
They have a hefty limit of 20,000 images each. Once you label people and pets within Google Photos, use them to create a Live Album, which will automatically add photos of certain people to that album as they're uploaded or backed up to Google Photos. (You may have to turn that feature on in the Android app.) Google's face-matching takes care of the rest. In the future, searching by name in Google Photos will make it easier to find (almost) every picture of that person, dog, or cat. Click a person without a label and enter their name. It features a row of headshots from your photos. If you're on the mobile app, tap Search (or on the web app, click Explore at the left), and at the top of the screen, you'll see People & Pets. Location searches are also easy with geo-tagging, making it easy to find, say, all your vacation pictures at once. Useful and creepy! (It also pulled in pictures of stuffed animals, a woodchuck, and my brother in a Chewbacca costume, so usefulness is in the eye of the beholder.) I didn't tag any of those pics with "dog" or "statue," by the way: Google just knows. For example, a search of the term "dog" got just about every image I could conceive of with my pups in the pics-even some with just a pup statue or paw. Google's auto-tagging of images is pretty amazing, beyond just face recognition (which will ID people in photos even if they're in the background).


Try some searches in Google Photos, using terms common and obscure. Select Slideshow and the album you're viewing will display photos in order. On the web or in the Android app, tap the ellipsis menu at the upper right. Go into any album of images and display it as a slideshow, which is especially nice when you pair your device with a Chromecast With Google TV on a big TV. (Note: The stuff you uploaded before June 1, 2021, doesn't count against your 15GB.) Show a Slideshow But if you're with Google for the long haul, maybe even willing to pay that $1.99 a month for 100GB, read on for how to get the most out of it.

You may be so mad at Google that you want to switch after its bait-and-switch, and we can't blame you.

You can still use the Picasa desktop software, but it'll never get an update. Google Photos also replaced our former Editors' Choice pick for photo software, Picasa, the desktop program Google acquired in 2004. Google Photos came about by salvaging the best part of the Google+ social network that no one wanted to use-the photo storage and sharing. Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security Software.
