Google+ was nowhere near the success that the company might have hoped, with people still opting for the likes of Facebook and Twitter for their social media needs.
That doesn't mean, however, that Google+ was completely useless. One of its most loved features was Google+ Photos, with many hoping that eventually the company would spin G+ Photos off as its own service. Well, that day has finally come.
The first thing to notice about the new Photos app, after going through the tutorial, is how clean it is. Photos can easily be arranged by day, month, or in either "compact view," which shows more photos on the screen, or "comfortable view," which makes photos the width of the screen and only fits around two photos at once. For the hipsters among us who don't want to conform to a particular view, you can also simply pinch to zoom in, showing fewer photos, or to zoom out, showing more.
Users can also choose to view their photos by album, or by "story." Stories are automatically created by Google and feature a number of photos organized like a scrapbook.
Perhaps in tandem with its cleanliness is its speed. Once the app has loaded all your photos into the library, changing views is seamless and instantaneous, at least on the Nexus 6. This largely depends on the Internet connection that the user has, but reports indicate that even on rather spotty Wi-Fi, Photos performs faster than expected. Searching through the app is equally fast, with users being able to search based on location.
Another big draw to the app are its editing features, of which there are many. Users can still choose to have Google "Auto" edit their photo, or they can delve into manually doing it. Users are given the option of changing the light, color, and pop (or contrast), or making the photo a vignette.
Apart from that, there is a range of filters that can be chosen from, and users can, of course, crop and rotate their photo. A neat feature is that users can choose to rotate a photo as much or as little as they want. For example, one can rotate a photo 39 degrees, and an outline of the final photo will be shown as the app autocrops it to be rectangular.
As expected, users can also have their photos automatically uploaded to Google. Google will allow users to upload an unlimited number of high quality photos, or users can choose to have them uploaded at their original size, which will count against Drive storage.
This hands-on, of course, mainly concerns the mobile app for Google Photos. However, after digging around the desktop version for a little bit, it seems as though they are almost exactly the same, both in layout and in functionality.
