Google Photos at 1 year: 200M users, 24 billion selfies

While it began life much earlier as part of the Google+ social network, it's now been one full year since Google Photos was launched as an individual cloud-based photo storage service. To celebrate, Google has shared some stats on the service to highlight its rapid growth, most notable is a user count of over 200 million, an impressive figure for just 12 months.

Google Photos debuted in May of last year, seeing the release of apps for both iOS and Android, as well as a web version. Plus, it only took five months for the service to attract its first 100 million users.

Since last year, Google says users have created 1.6 billion animations, collages, and movies from their uploads, along with 2 trillion labels applied. Even more interesting, and a clear sign of the times, is that 24 billion photos have been labeled as selfies. We sure are putting our smartphones' front-facing cameras to work these days.

In total, Google Photos has allowed users to free up 13.7 petabytes of storage on their devices, with an estimated 424 years needed to swipe through every photo.

As more people move their photo libraries to the cloud, the issue of storage space is an important one. Google Photos offers unlimited storage for users who choose high quality photo uploads over original quality, which will count towards the limit.

That could be changing in the near future, however, for owners of Nexus devices. As we noted earlier this week, the latest APK for the Google Photos app includes details on Nexus owners getting "unlimited free storage for original quality photos and videos." There's no word on when this feature may debut, however it could be a big draw for Android users to switch to a Google device.

SOURCE Google Blog