Google Photos — a packrat’s review

tl;dr Google Photos is promising but missing some critical, tiny features that Google could easily add, and there are a few bugs.

I’ve been an avid photographer since I got my first digital camera in 1999, and today I have more than 300,000 photos and thousands of videos. There are a few good images in there, but my interest has always been more in capturing the events of my life than in creating art.

Despite major advances in storage, my photo library always seems to grow faster than my hard disk, and managing all these images has become a major hassle. I have many boring stories about RAID arrays and de-duplication scripts, so it was with great enthusiasm that I noted the launch of Google Photos this week.

Google Photos promises unlimited cloud storage and automatic AI-based organization of all your photos. The free version does some lossy compression of your photos and videos, but if you’re willing to give them some money (I am) they will keep your original photo and video files. There are mobile apps and uploader clients for Mac and Windows, and there is a web client for the desktop.

Google Photos is also a spinoff of one of the best-loved features of Google+. It’s unclear whether this heralds some change in Google’s social strategy, but it certainly seems possible. It is notably a major Google product release without a “Beta” label.

Uploading the photos on my iPhone was incredibly easy; just install the (very nice) app and let it go. The Mac desktop uploader sits in your menubar and uploads your photos in the background. You can tell it which folders to search and it does its thing. It’s an unpolished but functional client with a fairly ugly setup process.

Unfortunately it’s also very slow. Even attached to the 250Mbps pipe at my office, images trickle out. And there’s no way to throttle (or de-throttle) the upload. So if, like me, you have a lot of photos, be prepared for your upload to take days. For some reason, the iPhone uploader is substantially faster.

I also encountered a few videos that failed to upload. Google Photos offered no explanation, but it offered to retry. I retried a few times but it kept failing.

Once uploaded, accessing your photos from your phone, tablet, or web browser is incredibly fast and smooth. I was really impressed with how quickly thumbnails and full-size images loaded. At times it seemed like the images displayed faster than they did in Adobe Lightroom from the local disk. It’s really great.

The AI-based organization is also, provisionally, wonderful. Searches like “breakfast in San Francisco” and “hiking in Germany” worked almost unbelievably well and are a special kind of sci-fi magic.

The AI is a little buggy, though, and when it doesn’t work, you’re completely un-empowered to organize things on your own because Google Photos has very limited metadata editing.

For example, Google bulked a huge number of my photos into a location called “Central” which includes photos from Chicago, Hong Kong, and West Virginia. For my thousands of photos that don’t include location information because they were taken in the pre-smartphone era, Google offers no way to tag them with their locations.

And most annoyingly, even though I’ve uploaded 10s of thousands of photos this weekend, Google Photos has only created seven face groups. It keeps adding new photos to each of those groups, but no new faces have appeared. There’s no way for me to create my own face groups, so until Google fixes the bug, I’m left hanging out with these seven randomly selected people from my life.

There’s also no way to edit the capture time of the images you upload. Of course you could modify the EXIF data of your photos before uploading them, but this isn’t possible for all media (nor is it very much fun). So I’m stuck with my home movies from the 80s showing up in May of 2015, because that’s when I uploaded them.

In fact, the only metadata you can edit is a free-text description of each photo. There’s no way to tag photos, except to put some searchable words into that description or to add the photos to an album. That would be okay, but adding photos to albums requires five clicks! I found myself wanting a one-click “Favorite” button pretty regularly.

It turns out that a limited amount of metadata editing can be done using Google+ itself, and perhaps the Picasa desktop client, and both use the same underlying photo store as Google Photos. Which is great for now — but Picasa is feeling pretty creaky in 2015 and Google+ Photos seems to be deprecated as well. I suspect neither product will be long for this world.

In summary, I find the promise and most of the performance of Google Photos tantalizing. The AI-based grouping is sexy but “Beta” at best. I am sure that will improve, but I also hope that Google’s vision of the future includes allowing humans to have a meaningful role in organizing their information, and not to trust it entirely to computers.