These 7 features show why you should use Google Photos to store and manage all your photos and videos (GOOG)

Google Photos

Google Photos is Google's photo management service that works both as a gallery app on smartphones, tablets, and the web, as well as a good piece of software that uses the company's artificial intelligence to make cool stuff with your photos and videos.

The app's interface is divided into four tabs: Assistant, Photos, Albums, and Sharing.

On the Assistant tab, you'll find that Google's digital helper automatically fills your feed with pictures to "rediscover" from the same day in past years and offers slick animations and videos generated out of similar shots you have taken.

"Photos" is the tab where all of your pictures are stored, while "Albums" keeps things organised in both automatically sorted as well as personalised albums. "Sharing" keeps track of all the albums you have shared with others, and allows you to edit them (if you have permission) at any time.

Automatic actions are a big part of Photos; there are, however, a few cool things that you can do with Google Photos yourself can enhance the usefulness of the product.

Here are seven of them:

Create, save, and share animations and collages with your photos

Google Assistant will do this automatically for you in some cases, but that will mostly happen if you took repeated shots of the same subjects.

However, you can still create animations manually: Just long press on a shot, select the ones you want to put together, and hit the "+" button at the top.

Photos will create a little GIF (that can also be saved as a video) and put it right next to the original photographs inside of Photos.

You can also create collages, which will put a series of shots next to each other in a single, easily shareable picture.

Let Photos create short movies with your best shots

Animations are easy and fun, but Google Photos also lets you do more complex things, such as videos.

Much like with animations, all you have to do is select a bunch of photos, hit the "+" button, and then "Movie."

Photos will bring you to the app's built-in video editor, where you can select in what order the photos (or clips) show, how long they should last, and even give you access to songs to add in the background.

Free up your phone's storage by offloading all your pictures to the cloud

Another great feature of Google Photos is the one that allows you to get rid of the physical files of your photographs by uploading them to the cloud.

Here's how it works: Open the app, go to the aptly named "Free up storage" section, and let Google Photos scan your entire photo library.

The service will then ask you to upload them all to the cloud; once it's done, the physical copies inside your device's storage will essentially be duplicates, and Photos will prompt you to delete them.

On an iPhone, this operation will empty the stock Photos app, but of course all your shots will still be available through Google Photos.

There is no limit to how many pictures you can upload to Google Photos, so long as your photographs are smaller then 16MP (bigger shots will be automatically downsized).

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