Following the recent update that rolled out for Google Photos for Android, Google has released the latest update for its Photos app for iOS to bring a number of interesting new features for iPhone and iPad users.
As officially announced by Google on Google+, version 1.4 of its Photos app for iOS includes improved people search capabilities that build upon its people labeling feature introduced in Photos for Android. The feature allows users to name people in their photos and merge people groupings so that users can easily search for these people by combining them with other search terms related to places and things.
For instance, searching for "Johnny at the museum in Chicago" will bring up more specific photos related to those terms instead of manually sifting through the photos. Unfortunately, this feature is available only for users in the United States, and Google does not specify when international users will be able to do the same.
The changelog also shows Google has included the ability to share animations with other people via Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, as well as a number of bug fixes and app startup improvements.
For now, Google has held back on adding support for Chromecast, a feature which is now available for the Android app. However, Chromecast support is coming "soon," says Google.
Google's Photos app will automatically back up users' photos to the cloud as well, but for users who are mindful of their privacy and want to keep their photos backed up privately instead, there is now a new option for that.
Along with the update to Photos, Google also released an updated Google Drive for iOS to allow users to automatically send backups of their photos to Drive instead of Photos. To do so, they only have to enable the option in the share sheet for iOS.
Previously, users could only back up their Photos for Drive one by one, which is a painstaking process, considering how many photos people take on their cameras. With the updated Drive app, users will be able to create private backups with far lesser clicks than before.
Users who have a ton of photos, however, might still like to keep the option to store their photos in the Photos app, since Google offers free unlimited storage as long as the photos are below a certain resolution. That said, those who like to keep the original resolution of their images and have some money to spare for extra storage can pay $1.99 for 100GB of extra cloud storage a month or $9.99 for 1TB.
The updated Google Photos and Google Drive apps for iOS are now available for download via the Apple App Store.
