Google revealed some interesting statistics about Google Photos in a blog post yesterday. The service was created when the company began dismantling its ill-regarded Google+ social network earlier this year, spinning off the more successful areas into their own platforms while it figures out what to do with the rest.
Photos was created with the aim of giving users a new way to organise and navigate through the vast albums of images most people will create in the life of a phone. Most people rarely look back at photos they have taken in the past though, something Google aimed to cure by introducing Google Photos with “automatic organization and great search.”
Google Photos fact card from 21/10/2015
Google
Since May, the service has grown to include over 100 million active users each month. Collectively, over 3,720 terabytes of phone storage has been freed up as people have moved their image libraries to the generally unlimited free cloud storage offered by Google Photos. The amount is apparently akin to filling a typical 16GB phone to capacity with photos every day for 637 years.
The types of photos being uploaded to the service are predictably the areas of life we like to photograph most. Weddings are the most photographed events, followed by concerts and Christmas, and more images of Paris have been uploaded than any other destination in the world. New York came second, followed by Barcelona.
Google Photos fact cards from 21/10/2015.
Google
Overall, food is the most photographed subject besides people. Dogs are the most popular animal while there is enough love for cars to drive the category into the number 2 spot for “things photographed.” Skies, beaches and mountains are also user favourites.
Google Photos is still growing as more Android users discover it and begin taking advantage of its wide-ranging features. Besides automatic cloud uploads and photo categorisation, the service can also be used to create animated GIFs — 15 million have been made already — and simplify sharing of albums and individual images with friends and family.
Google Photos fact cards from 21/10/2015.
Google
The platform has been positively received since its launch with praise directed towards its diverse range of features, generally accurate automatic organisation and simplicity of use. Attracting 100 million users in just five months is still a major achievement though, when rival photo-sharing platform Instagram took two-and-a-half years to reach the same mark.
All Google Photos users receive unlimited compressed image storage and 15GB of storage for uncompressed images for free. Further uncompressed space costs $1.99 a month for 100GB or $9.99 a month for 1TB.
