[avatar user=”marcos” size=”75″ /]

After about a week with the Google Photos app, which I posted on here last week I have some thoughts.

First of all, I think it is a fantastic app and application provided to us (free) by Google. I think it is a very smart and simple program to use and I’ve been dumping all my images on there (about 14 years worth of pictures from various cameras and phones).

Some great features that I’ve noticed is that Google Photos combines images and videos from the same event, day or location into a variety of different things for you to review and save, like: collages, gifs, panoramic, story (a collection of pictures and videos from a set time (a day to a few days) that tell a story), filtered/framed photos and movies (like a story but mostly told through videos pieced together to music). However, all of these are done by Google. For the most part they are fantastic and/or close enough to something really sweet. Some of them are way off and just odd.

For the most part, you can upload an image and the picture is placed when the file was saved. For example if I took an image back in May of 2004 the image will pop up in a section called May 2004. Sometimes the image pops up for the current date or oddly enough I have at least 3 pictures for December 1969…I’m not joking, not sure why that happened.

My one complaint would be that on my iPhone (I have a 5s) I noticed that the storage for the Google Photos app grew exponentially over the course of a few days. Originally only 50mb and by Tuesday I already had 1.3 gigs. I didn’t understand why. The purpose of the Google Photos app was to alleviate any need to have it stored on the phone. I decided to search to no avail, I could not find anyone on Google that was having this issue. I turned to Google+ and found the Google Photos page and left a comment to which I received a few comments, one of which stated:

Other people have mentioned that the size of the app itself grows to take up 20 gigs of space (which seems insane). One person commented that it is saving a cache of the thumbnail previews. Which seems ridiculous. Why would you want to back up your photos so that you can preview them in an app that takes up the entirety of your phone’s hard drive?

So, I decided to delete the app (which since this is on Google, if I delete the app everything remains fine online, since it is EVERYWHERE) and I re-downloaded it and noticed that everything the space the app was taking up was only 76MB, which is great. I have since played around with Google Photos and the space has increased to over 150 MB, but I will continue to monitor it and once it reaches a point, I’ll delete it again and re-download the app.

I can only hope that Google fixes this issue, I am thoroughly shocked that no one has complained about this yet.

Otherwise, I think this is an amazing app and one that everyone should get and try out.