Google Photos now has 200 million users

Google Photos now has 200M users, some of whom love pomeranians

A year on from its launch, Google Photos has picked up 200 million monthly active users. The news of the app’s steadily growing popularity was delivered by Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Wednesday during the opening day of the company’s I/O developer bash in Mountain View.

Of course, seeing that the cross-platform Photos app was spun out of Google+, many users will’ve been on board from the start. However, the company’s data shows it’s picked up 100 million new users in the last seven months, decent growth it’ll be keen to see continue.

Speaking to an audience of several thousand at the Shoreline Ampitheatre located just a short walk from the company’s Googleplex headquarters, Pichai highlighted the service’s smart computer-vision system with a few amusing tidbits.

For example, the image recognition technology, which allows users to search albums without prior tagging, has already applied up to two trillion labels to pictures. This, the CEO said, is what allows us to find the right picture when we search for images of a pomeranian dog. After revealing that 24 billion of these labels are for selfies, Pichai joked that there are quite a few “pomeranian selfies” among them before promptly projecting a collection of the cute doggie pics on a large screen behind him. While this would suggest that pomeranians are going around with smartphones taking pictures of themselves, we think we know what he meant.

Allowing users to edit, organize, and store their images in the cloud, Google has been gradually adding new features to its Photos app since its launch a year ago.

Thanks to the most recent update, rolled out last week, users can finally start adding comments to individual images, while the introduction of “smart suggestions” means that when an album is shared with you, the app now automatically recommends pictures that you might want to add to that album by examining data such as the shot’s location and when it was taken.

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