Google Photos is a mainstay of consumer photo editing and organizing, with more than 1.5 billion users and 9 trillion stored images, according to the company. Available on mobile and the web, it has a simple, intuitive design that makes it easy to back up, organize, edit, and share your digital photos. The app's natural language search tool is exceptional at helping you find images based on objects, people, and places in them, while AI features automatically produce artful content from your pictures or remove objects and backgrounds. For all these reasons, Google Photos is an Editors' Choice winner among online photo editors.

What's New in Google Photos?

Google Photos has gained several intriguing new features since the time of our last review, but note that most are available only in the mobile version of the app. Here are the highlights (in order of importance):

Magic Editor for All: Formerly available only to recent Google Pixel phone owners, anyone can now use Magic Editor features in the Google Photos mobile app. Those include the ability to blur the backgrounds of portraits and move and remove objects. Meanwhile, the Reimagine feature lets you describe items for AI to generate. The latter wasn't available yet on my test devices.

An Updated Interface: In the mobile app, you now see editing tools right along the bottom of a photo, and you can tap parts of the image to have AI suggest changes to it, such as blurring or removing the background.

Share Albums With QR Codes: This mobile app feature saves you from having to email or text an album link. It works for flyers, posters, and more, and supports direct phone-to-phone sharing.

Search Improvements With AI: The new Ask option in the mobile app lets you write things like "Mets game with French family two years ago" to get right to the photos at that location and with those people at that time. You can still search for specific filenames or contacts' names if you labeled them. You can also now search for words in a photo by using quotation marks.

Personal Montage: Tell the app who and what you want to include, and it produces a highlight video (or sizzle reel). This feature is available on the mobile and web versions of the app.

Grid Controls: On the mobile app, you can hide screenshots or stack similar photos in your grid view. You can also hide photos from other apps that clutter your view.

AI Metadata: For photos you edit with AI tools like Magic Editor and Magic Eraser, Google Photos now adds metadata that indicates that you did so. You can see this info in the Photos Info panel on both the mobile and web versions of the app.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

Price: It Depends on Storage

To get started with Google Photos on the web, simply point your browser to photos.google.com and log in to your Google account. Or download the app and sign in there. You get 15GB of free storage with a Google account. If 15GB isn't enough for your photos, you can pay for a Google One plan (below), which also unlocks more powerful editing tools and filters. It's also possible to get more storage for Google apps via a Gemini AI plan.

• $1.99 per month for 100GB of storage
• $2.99 per month for 200GB
• $9.99 per month for 2TB

Those prices are competitive. OneDrive, which includes decent photo editing and viewing capabilities, gives you just 5GB of online storage for free. A $19.99-per-year Microsoft 365 Basic plan gets you 100GB of storage, while a $99.99-per-year Personal plan includes 1TB of storage and the downloadable office productivity apps.

An Apple account gets you just 5GB of free storage. Otherwise, you can pay $0.99 per month for 50GB of iCloud storage or $9.99 per month for 2TB. However, the web version of iCloud Photos is severely limited; it doesn't even offer a search function.

Flickr now lets you upload up to 1,000 photos for free, but for $72.99 per year, you can get unlimited storage for full-resolution photos and lots of community, organizing, and sharing features.

Uploading Pictures: Several Choices (for Now)

If a cloud photo service's main purpose is to gather all your photos from every source, it needs the ability to auto-upload from desktop folders and mobile apps. Like Flickr, iCloud, and OneDrive, Google Photos has this functionality. On the desktop browser version of the app, you can specify folders from which you want Google Photos to upload items.

Alternatively, you can set the Google Drive syncing utility to auto-upload photos. The uploader has a full-resolution option, which is great for shutterbugs. You get choices for auto-uploading from camera memory cards, My Pictures, and the Desktop folder. The utility adds a system tray icon from which you can open the web view or change upload settings. However, the Google Photos site doesn't have a link to this utility any longer, so it might not be a viable option for long.

Other options for getting your pictures into Google Photos include importing from Facebook, iCloud, or scanning services. Finally, Google's PhotoScan app lets you reproduce physical prints using your smartphone and save them to the cloud.

Interface and Ease of Use: Slick and Well-Organized

The Google Photos web interface is clean, minimalist, and pleasing. Unlike Flickr's free version, it doesn't have ads.

It organizes thumbnails of your photos by date. You can choose between a black or white background; I prefer the former since it helps photos stand out. Along the top of the main view are your Auto Creations and Memories. The former are photos and videos that the app automatically enhances in some way, and the latter are auto-curated groups of images (such as those related to pets, highlights, special events, and trips). Below are thumbnails of all the pictures you have on the service in reverse chronological order.

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The left-hand menu choices are simple, with just three in the top group for Photos, Updates, and Print Store. The Collections group below that has a lot of viewing options: Albums, Documents, Screenshots & Recordings, Favorites, People & Pets, Places, Videos, Recently Added, Archive, Locked Folder, and Trash. A progress bar at the bottom indicates how much storage you've used and how much remains. A search bar is at the top. A + button for adding photos and creations is at the top right, along with Help and Settings icons.

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When you click into the search box, you see suggestions and people bubbles along the bottom, along with a See All People link. Even though the web view doesn't have a separate Ask tab like the mobile interface, the search is semantic and uses AI. As a result, you don't have to search for specific dates, people, or places. You can just type something generic like "family at the beach" to get relevant results. Google Photos groups the most relevant results along the top. If you have media that you don't want to appear in search results but still want in Google Photos, you can place it in the Archive or Locked sections.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

Clicking on a photo thumbnail takes you to a clean, photo-only viewing page. A simple spin of the mouse wheel zooms in and out of the photo. Pressing the right and left arrow keys takes you through your collection. In a clever interface design touch, the image appears just by itself if you don't move the cursor over it for a few seconds. When you do, you see overlay choices (in order) for sharing, editing, zooming, info display, favoriting, and trash. The three-dot overflow menu gives you more options, such as downloading the photo, moving the image to a locked folder, and starting a slideshow. If your image is a raw camera file (Google Photos supports most popular raw formats), that bit of info appears first in the group of overlaid icons.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

The Info panel that appears when you click its button or type i shows image information like the date, camera model, f-stop, shutter speed, size, ISO setting, and uploaded method, along with a map of its location. It pulls that last detail automatically from most smartphone shots, but you can add a location using Google Maps search.

Face Recognition: Impressive Accuracy

Most modern photo editing apps can identify a human face, and many can even group photos of the same individual with remarkable accuracy. (Side profile views are much less of a challenge than in the past, too.) Google goes further than competitors with its ability to detect the same person (or pet) over the course of a lifetime.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

It's simple to add a name to a face in a text box when you click into a face set Google Photos identifies. You can create and share an album of photos that feature the found face or order a book right from the People view. It's a little harder than it should be to remove a photo from the set; you have to go to the three-dot overflow menu and give a reason for removing. Still, the face recognition is so accurate that you're unlikely to need to do this. I wish there were a way to prevent the app from tagging random faces it detects in your photos of people, however.

Photo Adjustment and Enhancement: Decent Tools

The Google Photos web app has a good selection of photo editing and enhancement tools. The first tab on the Edit page is Suggestions, which includes some computational image enhancements. The number of effects available varies based on a picture's content. For example, those with faces have more options, such as Portrait, which blurs the background and boosts face lighting.

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The Adjust section offers 14 tools in total. You get sliders for (in order) HDR Effect, Brightness, Contrast, White Point, Highlights, Shadow, Black Point, Saturation, Warmth, Tint, Skin Tone, Blue Tone, Pop, and Vignette. Google Photos approaches pro photo software functionality, though you don't get color wheels, histograms, or tone curves. I also wish that more granular undo steps were available for edits, like in Lightroom.

Note that only the web version of Google Photos lets you use these with raw camera files. In my testing on an iPhone, no editing was possible with raw files. On Android, the app says it needs to change the raw file to a JPG before you can edit it and suggests moving to an app like Lightroom mobile. Doing so negates the wider editing possibilities of raw images, of course.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

The Filters tab of the Edit page offers a dozen Instagram-like color and black-and-white effects, which are almost an afterthought in light of so many other cool editing options. Finally, the Markup tools let you scribble in many colors over your photo with a pen or highlighter; on mobile, you also get a text tool. Still missing are any local adjustments, like blemish and red-eye removal, which you get with the free Apple Photos and the Windows Photos apps. Our full comparison between Google Photos and Apple Photos outlines even more differences.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

The software's Magic Eraser feature (available only in the mobile app and on Chromebook Plus computers) can remove unwanted objects from an image or tone down distraction colors with its Camouflage option. The tool analyzes your image to suggest extraneous people that you can zap with a tap. Alternatively, you can brush over an object to replace it with the background texture.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

Video Editing: Limited Options

Google Photos can automatically upload videos from smartphones and offers a view of just those files. However, you don't get deep video editing capabilities, especially in the web browser version, where the only options are to loop videos or create and trim a highlight video with background music. For multitrack timeline editing with overlays, look to entry-level video editing software like Apple iMovie and Microsoft Clipchamp.

The mobile app is far more robust for video than the desktop web browser version. It lets you join, trim, and reorder clips, as well as add background music. It even offers stabilization, frame capturing, and the same color and lighting adjustments you get for photos—brightness, contrast, saturation, and so on. It's on par with many standalone mobile video editing apps.

Social and Sharing: Smart Connections

The Updates button takes you to conversation threads for photo and album sharing. From this view, you see everything you've shared. Each entry appears as a separate chat group, and any participants can add photos and write messages. You can also share entire albums with other people.

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The interface is fluid, but it's yet another place where people have to check for messages. Participants at least get an email and app notification when a new photo or comment arrives.

Because it's more for private use, Google Photos doesn't have public social features like favoriting and following that you get with Flickr's huge social photo community, not to mention the enormous social possibilities you get from Facebook or Instagram. Members of a sharing group can comment on or heart an image, though.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

The Share menu presents Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) as options, along with a shareable link. To share something directly, you can enter an email address or Google contact ID in the search box at the top of this dialog. The top of that dialog suggests contacts, such as those whose faces appear in the photos you are sharing.

Mobile App Experience: Fully Capable

The Google Photos mobile app is more powerful than the web version, with spiffy new tools like Magic Editor and the AI-powered Ask button for finding photos with natural language queries. The Android and iOS versions are practically identical, with buttons across the bottom for Photos, Collections, and Ask. Both app versions show a single row along the top for Memories, stylized photos and videos, and photos of a particular person.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

The Collections page is where you find the rest of your albums, a map that lets you zoom in on all photos you took in a particular location, and the people view. It's also where you find Moments, auto-suggested albums based on events. Toward the bottom of this screen, you get filters for (in order) Favorites, Screenshots, Videos, Recently Added, Archive, Locked photos, and Trash.

Photo Books: Easy to Make

Tap the Print Store option in the left-hand menu to create physical mementos from your digital images. You can also use Google Photos to print excellent holiday gifts.

For just $14.99 (softcover) or $29.99 (hardcover), you can order a square book with your photos. That's less than you pay with Snapfish for their lowest-cost photo books. Google's entry-level book is just 7.0 by 7.0 inches, though, compared with 8.0-by-8.0 inches for the other services. If you upgrade to a hardcover book, the price compares well with Flickr's photo books, which start at $28.99 for a 20-page, 11.0-by-8.5-inch book. But again, the Google book is smaller at 9.0 by 9.0 inches.

(Credit: Google/PCMag)

The Print store suggests books to create from your photos, with titles like Best of 2021 or Trip to Arizona. It even builds the page layout, letting you add and remove photos to your taste. Searching for replacement photos is simple and doesn't take you out of the book design workflow. You can crop the selected pictures, drag them around to different places in the layout, add text captions, and choose borders or no borders.

I put Google Photos book printing to the test when the capability first arrived. Even when choosing the lowest price option, the results were acceptable, if not spectacular.

(Credit: Michael Muchmore)

Ordering Prints: Reasonable Price and Quality

Speaking of photo printing, you can print your pictures using Google Photos. Same-day pickup for 4.0-by-6.0-inch prints costs $0.42 apiece at your local CVS, $0.40 at Walgreens, or $0.25 at Walmart. Shipping your prints drops the price to $0.18 per 4-by-6. Wall art canvas prints start at $24.99 for an 8.0-by-8.0-inch wrapped canvas. The print prices are reasonable for same-day service. CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart Photo all performed well in our tests of online photo printing services.