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Google Photos is a photo sharing and storage service developed by Google. Google Photos gives users free, unlimited storage for photos up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p resolution. The service automatically analyzes photos, identifying various visual features and subjects. Users can search for anything in photos, with the service returning results from three major categories: People, Places, and Things. Google Photos recognizes faces, grouping similar ones together; geographic landmarks (such as the Eiffel Tower); and subject matter, including birthdays, buildings, animals, food, and more. Google Photos received critical acclaim at its launch in May 2015. It was declared "the best" in cloud photo storage by some reviewers, and Google's decision to decouple the Photos service from Google+ was praised. Reviewers liked the updated Photos service for its recognition technology, search, apps, and loading times. Nevertheless, privacy concerns were raised, including Google's motivation for building the service, as well as its relationship to governments and possible laws requiring Google to hand over a user's entire photo history. Shortly after release, Photos incorrectly marked a photo of two African Americans as "Gorillas", and Google issued an apology.

Google Photos has two storage settings: "High quality" and "Original quality". High quality includes unlimited photo and video storage for photos up to 16 megapixels and videos up to 1080p resolution (the maximum resolutions for average smartphone users in 2015). Original quality preserves the original resolution and quality of the photos and videos, but uses storage quantity in the users' Google account.

The service offers apps for the Android and iOS operating systems, and a website. Users back up their photos to the cloud service, which become accessible for all of their devices.

The Photos service analyzes and organizes images into groups and can identify features such as beaches, skylines, or "snowstorm in Toronto". From the application's search window, users are shown potential searches for groups of photos in three major categories: People, Places, and Things. The service analyzes photos for similar faces and groups them together in the People category.[3] It can also track faces as they age. The Places category uses geotagging data but can also determine locations in older pictures by analyzing for major landmarks (e.g., photos containing the Eiffel Tower). The Things category processes photos for their subject matter: birthdays, buildings, cats, concerts, food, graduations, posters, screenshots, etc. Users can manually remove categorization errors.