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This may sound defensive, but its just a genuine answer, as I agree that many photos are pretty pointless. In my case I uploaded every photo I've taken since I

This may sound defensive, but its just a genuine answer, as I agree that many photos are pretty pointless. In my case I uploaded every photo I've taken since I got my first digital camera in 2000, and I do look at some of them. To try to answer your question directly: I just checked and I have roughly 100 albums with roughly 50 photos, so I expect that I'll go back to those when I want a trip down memory lane, etc. As for the other ~36k, I don't have any statistics but: * On ~10 occasions I've sent emails to friends after getting one of the "this day in YYYY" notifications with a link to the photos * On a few (~4) occasions, I've used the faces grouping to find old, fun photos of friends * Yesterday I happened to get a "This day in YYYY" notification that reminded me about an event I photographed at my neighbors house, but had forgotten to send the photos (7 years ago, oops) * I'd rediscovered some DSLR photos I probably would have missed thanks to the "approx location tagging" (that taps in my phones location history) * I share photos far more frequently since its free, unlimited and auto-upload * The auto-animations and auto-panoramas have made me go back and rediscover photos from some old trips * Just the other day my Mom was interested in a photo she remembered me taking on a trip in 2013. I was able to search the place name and find the photo in seconds I started down the path of Google Photos because my old workflow of manually merging smartphone and DSLR pics on disk and then not having a good centralized album management system felt clunky. I'm surprised by how often I find myself going to http://photos.google.com http://photos.google.com now.

fcmk 10y ago
Do you have a local backup of those photos? Every now and then someone's Google Account gets mistakenly shut down by, I presume, some automated risk assessment process and they can have a really tough time contacting anybody to rectify the issue. I'd say you can use Google's services as tools, but not as the basket where you put all your eggs.
- nattaylor 10y ago
  Dataloss/lockout is a great concern of mine and I am somewhat exposed. For DSLR photos, I persist them on disk, then upload to Google Photos. For smartphone, I periodically copy the new ones to disk. Then that disk is remotely backed up. However, I am exposed to losing all of my GPhotos meta data (primarily albums and captions) as well was the smartphone photos since my last manual backup. I have accepted this tradeoff. It would be pretty devastating to loose all that organization, but its recreatable and the value I get out of Google Photos trumps that risk.
xanderstrike 10y ago
The value of Google's automated processing of images can't be understated. Last year I uploaded roughly 50,000 photos to Google, which was every photo I had taken since 2006. Google automatically created albums for every vacation I'd gone on in that time, plus many of the major events. Weddings, concerts, etc, were all identified. Also the face search is probably the most brilliant piece of it. I began meticulously tagging photos in Lightroom a few years ago, and had probably 15-20% of my photos tagged with location and people in the photo. It was a pain in the ass and took forever to get to that point. Meanwhile it took less than a week to upload everything to Google Photos, and now I can search through over 10 years of photos by person. You can also search by event, object, location, etc ("coachella," "sailboat," or "haiti" as examples).
- nattaylor 10y ago
  I completely agree. In other software labeling (albums, location, faces, tags, etc) is tedious, time consuming and fragile. In Google Photos I barely even think about it.

fcmk 10y ago

Do you have a local backup of those photos? Every now and then someone's Google Account gets mistakenly shut down by, I presume, some automated risk assessment process and they can have a really tough time contacting anybody to rectify the issue. I'd say you can use Google's services as tools, but not as the basket where you put all your eggs.

nattaylor 10y ago
Dataloss/lockout is a great concern of mine and I am somewhat exposed. For DSLR photos, I persist them on disk, then upload to Google Photos. For smartphone, I periodically copy the new ones to disk. Then that disk is remotely backed up. However, I am exposed to losing all of my GPhotos meta data (primarily albums and captions) as well was the smartphone photos since my last manual backup. I have accepted this tradeoff. It would be pretty devastating to loose all that organization, but its recreatable and the value I get out of Google Photos trumps that risk.

xanderstrike 10y ago

The value of Google's automated processing of images can't be understated. Last year I uploaded roughly 50,000 photos to Google, which was every photo I had taken since 2006. Google automatically created albums for every vacation I'd gone on in that time, plus many of the major events. Weddings, concerts, etc, were all identified. Also the face search is probably the most brilliant piece of it. I began meticulously tagging photos in Lightroom a few years ago, and had probably 15-20% of my photos tagged with location and people in the photo. It was a pain in the ass and took forever to get to that point. Meanwhile it took less than a week to upload everything to Google Photos, and now I can search through over 10 years of photos by person. You can also search by event, object, location, etc ("coachella," "sailboat," or "haiti" as examples).

nattaylor 10y ago
I completely agree. In other software labeling (albums, location, faces, tags, etc) is tedious, time consuming and fragile. In Google Photos I barely even think about it.