Users will soon be able to automatically share all their uploaded photos with a loved one, or filter which specific photos are auto-shared by date or topic. But in a landscape fast becoming dominated by artificial intelligence, data - in this case, your photos - has become its own reward.Īt the company’s annual I/O developers conference, Google touted Photos as a signature platform getting a bevy of valuable updates. No one is quite sure what Google plans to do with all of these pictures in the long run, and it’s possible the company hasn’t even figured that out. It’s on a growth trajectory to ascend to the vaunted billion-user club with essential products such as YouTube, Gmail, and Chrome.

The cloud-storage service, salvaged from the husk of the struggling social network Google+ in 2015, now has 500 million monthly active users adding 1.2 billion photos per day.

Right now the company is feasting on photos and videos being uploaded through its surprisingly popular app Google Photos. Google tends to throw lots of ideas at the wall, and then harvest the data from what sticks.

Google uploaded photos