Google launches photo service

This is really interesting for several reasons. But this most important one for me personally is that Google decoupled this service from the other services.

My own use case is managing photos of my young kids, but I think the benefits of disentangling the service from other Google services apply to many different scenarios.

Like many parents, my wife and I take thousands of pictures of our kids. And, like most serial breeders, we no longer have time to deal with managing them or even importing them ourselves. We just want ALL our pictures to automatically go to the same shared archive, no matter who in our family took them and no matter what device was used, and we want to access that archive from all our computers and tablets and phones.

Apple's new iCloud Photo Library is totally unworkable for us, because iCloud's services are all coupled as a monolithic group. There is no way to do what we want without setting all our devices to use the same iCloud account -- but if we do that, then we can no longer find each other with Find My Friends, no longer have separate calendars and notes and other iCloud features.

For our photos, we currently use Dropbox Carousel -- but that only works because my wife doesn't use Dropbox, so we give up nothing by having her phones and tablets set up using my Dropbox account.

So for me, the key thing here is that Google smartly disentangled photos from its other services. My wife uses Gmail, and I use Google drive, but we can both set up Google Photos independently of the other Google services we use. So we will probably switch to this.

I can see this level of granularity being useful at work, too.