In the tech services world year it became clear that the free ride is over. We're talking about everything from email to music streaming, photos to files. That which seemed too good to be true was indeed too good to be free. Now is the point at which you'll do well to consider which services you cannot do without, and which services you should end - before they start burning a hole in your pocket.
Google Photos is changing how photos and videos count toward your Google account storage, and it's unlikely to come as welcome news for fans of the service. Until now, Google Photos has allowed free, unlimited uploads of "High Quality" compressed images in the cloud; from June 1, 2021, that's changing.
It seems Google Photos will get new editing features in an upcoming version, but they may be locked behind a paywall, at least based on reports from some users. The company has been slowly adding premium features to its Photos app, the most recent being a premium subscription feature for getting monthly photo prints.
Google has launched a monthly premium photo print subscription service for its Google Photos users, enabling anyone who is interested to automatically receive high-quality physical prints every month. This new service, which Google calls its premium print series, is priced at $6.99/month and includes 10 prints shipped monthly to customers.
In addition to all of the device announcements Google made today, the company also revealed that the Google Photos app for Android is getting a brand new photo editor. The new features shipping along with this update seem to be geared toward making it easier for anyone to edit, whether they don't have a ton of experience editing photos or they're looking to make some specific edits manually. In addition, Google also detailed a new feature called Portrait Light that will be heading to Pixel devices in the future, starting with the new phones that were revealed today.
Camera makers are pushing DLSRs, mirrorless ILCs, or even point-and-shoot cameras as the next step after graduating from smartphone cameras. But what they offer in power and quality, they often lose in convenience, especially in posting to social media or even transferring photos to the cloud. To their credit, they are doing their best to make those activities easier and Canon and Google have just made the ultimate next step in making Google Photos backups as painless and as seamless as possible.
Although often seen as a form of narcissism, selfies, just like the normal photos that we take, are the way this age celebrates and preserves memories. The growing capabilities of smartphones allow us to take photos by the dozens even hundreds, making it hard to organize and search for photos take just months ago. Google says it created Google Photos (and related cloud and AI features) just for that and now it's giving the app a refresh to put your memories front and center.
There has been a renaissance of interest in printed photos, partly thanks to the popularity of Instagram's square format and the return of instant-print "Polaroid" cameras. The latter, of course, means you'll have to carry another camera or at least buy a small pocket printer whose only use is to print such framed photos. If that sounds like more a hassle, Google thought so, too. It also thought it could make a small business out of printing photos for you but it turned out not to be that hot after all.
I expected the Facebook photo transfer tool to be a grudging concession and tricky to use, but it's actually one of the easiest new Facebook features I can remember trying. Announced late last year, but only now available worldwide, it's a topical addition given a resurgence of questions about the ethics of one social network having so much power in our daily lives and around our electoral system.
Facebook's photo transfer tool, which allows easy exports of any media uploaded to the social network, has rolled out globally the company has confirmed today. Announced back at the tail-end of 2019, the tool launched initially in Ireland as a way for Facebook users to move all of the photos and videos they've added to their profile to Google Photos, without having to download the archive first.
Google has announced a change to its Google Photos app that gives users more control over shared albums and who can access them. The company says this new feature builds upon the direct sharing feature Google introduced back in December for individual videos and images. Similar functionality is being added for shared albums, though the old sharing method isn't going anywhere.
Following its initial announcement of the offering late last year, Facebook has announced the North American release of its new tool that enables its users to transfer their uploaded images to Google Photos. The company initially made the tool available to a limited number of users in Ireland but announced on Thursday that it is once again expanding it to all of its users in the United States and Canada.