Until Google can offer us computerized pants—a real thing in development with Levi’s—we have Google Photos to keep us busy. And that it will.
The new app launched today offers a full suite of possibilities, allowing for more complex commands and options than one might find in their Camera Roll or on iPhoto. The software allows you to store all the photos you take on your phone; search through them with precise keywords; and make them into movies, animations, collages, and “stories,” as Google calls them, which are sort of like digital scrapbooks. Then you can share the above in huge batches using an auto-generated link.
The search function might be Google Photos’ most addicting feature. The app allows you to search within your thousands of stored photos by people (click on a photo of Marc Jacobs and it will load all the photos you’ve snapped of the designer—thanks, facial recognition!), by places (“Milk Studios”), and by things (“denim”). You also can quickly and easily transform pictures into GIFs; send hundreds of photos to friends or coworkers with the click of a button; and create photo montages and movies so cinematic, people will actually want to watch them. There’s also the standard photo app fair: applying filters, adjusting light, cropping, and more.
So what does this mean for the fashion community? Expect a lot more GIFs and a lot less frustration over finding the five great photos you took at the Alexander Wang show during the Spring 2016 season. You won’t need to worry about the doomsaying “Not Enough Storage” message popping up as you’re about to snap a selfie with Miley Cyrus in the front row at Moschino, because the app offers free and unlimited storage for photos, and you can create a digital photo album of your fashion week adventures, complete with a map that shows your route from New York to London to Milan to Paris, all on your phone.
Still, Google Photos has a long way to go before it replaces fashion’s favorite app, Instagram. At the moment, Google Photos features no public-sharing option, rendering it more akin to a photography tool than a must-have networking app. Plus, most of the features that make the app so cool—like its polished movies with soundtracks and stories with timelines and maps—can’t be shared over Instagram or Snapchat. And if a user can’t share his or her fashion week experience with followers, what’s the point?
