Apple Photos vs Google Photos
I’ve been a user of Apple Photos for 8 months now, all collection of photos of my family is there. Its features like face recognition were mind-blowing to me. I wanted Apple to analyze and apply all its AI power to my photo library so that I can look at my photos at a different angle. I wanted Apple to teach me how I can use my photos differently.
Almost everything with Apple Photos suited me well up to a moment when my iPhone started to show symptoms of its age and its low storage 32GB began to irritate me reminding me often of having not enough space. So I began thinking of purchasing a new phone and Google Pixel was one of the options along the iPhones. Considering an iPhone-vs-Pixel topic you inevitably need to consider Apple Photos vs Google Photos topic. This is how I started my investigation if Google Photos suits me and how I can migrate to it.
Application installation
The best way to learn something is to start using it, to work with it. So I installed Google Photos on my iPhone and was going to do the same on my mac and here was first differentiation I came upon.
There is no desktop Google Photos application. Google Photos has only mobile and web versions. Taking how powerful web applications can be these days, probably it’s totally fine and a valid decision to from Google not to build a desktop app.
On the other side, Apple Photos exists in all three incarnations — mobile, desktop and web. Web version though lacks any editing filtering capabilities and I never used it.
Uploading of an existing photo library
Uploading existing photos in Apple Photos is pretty straightforward. There is Import functionality in its desktop application. When importing it allows you to review what should be imported, it automatically detects photos that are already in your library and excludes them from import.
It worth mentioning that Apple Photos has upload limits and I reached them with ease.
I had to wait for another month in order for the rest of my library to be uploaded. It was really disappointing to me.
In Google Photos web application there is an “Upload” button. Uploading process doesn’t include review process and doesn’t prevent you from uploading duplicates, so nothing fancy. Just plain uploading of selected photos. I used it to upload minified versions of all my images in chunks. Not sure how well it will work if I need to upload original images and videos.
Google also provides a “Backup and sync tool” tool. You can set it up to sync images and videos from Google Drive with Google Photos. To me, this was not an option, because I didn’t want all the images and videos from Google Drive to be synced. Google doesn’t provide an option to sync only a specific folder from Google Drive.
If you just want to migrate from Apple Photos to Google Photos, then in Google Photos mobile app you need to turn on “Backup & sync” setting. Once you do it, all your photos and images begin to be downloaded from iCloud and uploaded to Google Photos.
Face recognition
As I said in the beginning, face recognition in Apple Photos amazed me. It automatically recognized people in photos so that you can easily group photos by people, search for photos that include certain people.
But starting evaluating Google Photos I very soon realized that Google does face recognition much much better.
Face recognition takes time
It took Google 2–3 days to recognize people in half of my images. Precision was very high, mistakes were rare. On the other hand, if there are mistakes, you can’t correct them and should live with them. I hope Google will give such an ability in the future.
Apple Photos, on the other hand, has been evaluating my images for months and still hasn’t provided a proper result. It does give you an ability to correct mistakes. I often had to manually tag people in my photos and correct Apple’s mistakes.
Important to note that face recognition didn’t work for me in Google Photos out of the box. After talking to its support, I found out that face recognition works only in US. Fortunately, they provided me with an easy workaround.
Beyond face recognition
One of the main advantages of Google Photos is its ability to recognize lots of other different things in your library. For example, you can easily search for photos with your pet, photos of you playing tennis, photos made in winter, photos of birthday, etc. And it’s amazing, you don’t need to tag your photos manually anymore, Google does it for you.
Apple also can recognize different things in your images but doesn’t do it that good as Google.
Search
I love Apple Photos for providing an ability to do a quite sophisticated search using so-called “Smart albums”.
Smart album allows you to search for images using different parameters like “Dade Captured”, “Person”, “Filename”, etc.
And you can combine multiple parameters using “any” or “all” conditions.
Google Photos implements search differently. You search images the same way you search for anything else on the Internet using Google Search.
It means that it’s very easy to do a simple search, but it lacks an option to do a sophisticated search.
Navigation
I found Google navigation panel very helpful and easy to use. You just hover over the right side and then click the month/year you want to see. And that’s it. Awesome user experience!
Apple photos just provide an option to see your images grouped by years.
Download
Sometimes you need to download images from the cloud. Therefore you need your service to provide such an option.
In Apple Photos you first select images you need to download. You can, for example, search for images using “smart folder”, then select all found images in the folder and then click “Export”.
Apple provides 2 options — export of original photos (and videos) and configured export using such parameters like “JPEG Quality” or “Size”.
Images will be downloaded in a specified folder.
In Google Photos you also first select images to be downloaded and then click “Download”.
Images are downloaded as a single file in a zip format.
Editing
Apple provides more powerful editing capabilities than Google does. For example, you can even adjust color curves in Apple Photos.
Google’s editing capabilities are less outstanding, but still very powerful and should be enough for unpretentious users.
Both Apple and Google provide some predefined filters that you can apply to your images.
Storage Options
In terms of price Google and Apple provide almost identical options. Consider the prices for Europe:
One severe advantage of Google is that you need to pay for storage only if you need to store your photos and videos in original quality. Google provides free unlimited storage if you agree for your images and videos to be optimized.
Conclusion
Each solution has its own strengths and weaknesses, there is no definite winner. So everyone can decide what is more important to him and what is less.
Outstanding AI capabilities of Google Photos, its cross-platform Web and Mobile applications are the most important factors to me. Editing and Search features are more than enough to me. So Goole Photos is a winner to me and migration to Google Photos should not be a problem :)
