Google Will Launch Google Photos, A Standalone Photo Host With “Unlimited Storage”
Its been rumored for weeks, but consider it mostly official: Google is launching a photo service separate of Google+.
We just heard it straight from the horses mouth while walking the halls of Google I/O, though I don’t think we were supposed to hear it just yet. It’ll be announced during Google’s I/O keynote, scheduled to start in an hour.
Here’s what we gleaned:
It’s called “Google Photos”, and will live at photos.google.com (this url currently points to part of Google+)
They’re pitching it as having “unlimited storage”. Previous Google photo hosting services (like Picasa) ate into your Gmail/Drive/Google+ storage limits. “Unlimited” tends to come with caveats, so we’ll wait and see what exactly that entails. Caveats like…
It sounded like photos would be capped at 16MP and will also store video, capped at 1080P.
A new Photos app is coming to Android; it’s got better photo sorting (with things like day-by-day sorting) and a feature called “Assistant”.
This is, obviously, something that users have been requesting forever: a way to store photos with Google without having to deal with all the social cruft involved with Google+.
More later, as the Google I/O keynote plays out. It’s scheduled to start at 9:30 am pacific; catch our live blog here!