Google Photos for Android

Google's Photos app for Android combines effortless backup with powerful, easy-to-use editing tools to create an essential photography tool for your phone.

Pros

Automatically organized: By default, Google Photos displays your images by date. But it also automatically assigns categories to your images so that you can sort by people, places, or things or search on a term to see all the images Google Photos has assigned the tag to. You can also create an album, a collage of images, or an animation of images.

Edit your photos: Fine-tune the look of your images by making adjustments to color, tweaking exposure and lighting, adding filters, and cropping and rotating. An auto-enhance tool takes a good shot at improving image quality with one tap.

Cloud storage: You get unlimited photo storage if you use Google's high-quality compression setting for images. In that setting, photos under 16 megapixels are untouched; photos larger than 16 megapixels are compressed. (Videos higher than 1080p will be resized to high-definition 1080p.) If you decided to not compress your photos, the first 15GB of online storage is free; additional storage starts at $19.99 per year for 100GB. The contents of your Google Drive, including Gmail and photos, count toward the storage limit. You can choose to free up space on your phone by removing photos and videos already backed up to your Google Photos library on Drive.

Sync and backup: You can set the app to automatically back up and sync photos from your phone to the cloud. The Google Photos Backup app for Mac and PC can automatically back up photos from your Mac or Windows PC to the cloud as well.

Sharing: Select one or multiple images or an album and tap the Share icon. You can share the image via email or chat, for example, or create a link that allows someone to view the photo or shared album or folder on your Google Drive.

SEE: Keep Your Photos Safe in the Cloud with the Best Online Photo Storage

Cons

Can't assign tags: While Google Photos assigns tags to your images, you can't assign your own tags, as you can in Flickr, Apple Photos, and other photo services.

Lack of galleries: When it was part of Google+, Photos could take advantage of Google's social network to display image galleries. Now that it's on its own, Google Photos offers no easy way to display your work via galleries to the public, as you can on Flickr and 500px.

Bottom Line

With helpful organization, powerful editing tools, cloud syncing, and backup, Google Photos offers almost everything you'd want in a photo service. The lack of user-generated tags is one of the few things keeping Photos from being all you'd need in a photo app.