Since you're ending free unlimited photo storage, I badly want a feature that automatically finds all groupings of similar photos and deletes all but the best one (least blurry, most smiles, whatever you decide). Whenever I take photos, I tend to spam the shutter button, so I end up with 3+ photos of anything and everything. I could stay on Google Photos for many, many more years if I had this auto clean up capability.
(There are a lot of "Gemini" bitcoin apps, apparently...)
Off topic but I also hate the new trend of apps not telling you how much the full version costs until after you’ve installed it.
Like most things from Google, the engineers and PMs on that feature got promoted and the feature eventually went away.
It was called Auto Awesome:
https://picasageeks.com/tag/combining-pictures-to-get-the-be...
https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-trigger-the-Auto-Awesome-in-G...
I had some great results from that feature, e.g. from big group shots at a party.
Can we please please get a return of the Assistant-style creations? All that exists now is the Instagram Stories-style auto-playing albums. Does anyone actually like these better?
It was something that could have probably used a UX refresh, but was instead removed entirely in future phones.
I'd love if cloud services implemented something similar.
Possibly a compromise could be an auto-collapse function where Photos shows it as a stack with the AI-proposed best pick on top, and an option to fan out and make your own judgment. That doesn't on its own fix the storage side, but it would be a small step from there to a one-click "trash everything from this stack other than the featured item.
Apple kind of does this with live photos, but it would be nice to have GPhotos able to figure it out as well after the fact, since we've all been doing the "take many pics of it just in case" thing since forever.
I could see this being done locally on a device and having a dis-or-dat style interface to quickly choose between competing photos.
But I always liked the idea of never having to worry about storage space and was willing to pay a premium for it.
I doubt that in the end I had more than 100 or 200 Gigabyte stored there, so Google would be a better deal for me even as a fairly heavy user, but I'd be willing to pay that premium for peace of mind.
If Backblaze can offer unlimited backup data for $6, I bet Google could make something similar work for a restricted domain like photos.
I pay £2.49/month for 200GB which would cover your usage for cheaper. Or you can 2TB for £7.99 which would mean you'd never have to think about storage.