Google, Apple or Flickr: what is the best place for your images? – BBC

Drafting BBC

• June 3, 2015

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Your images are valuable for companies that are financed by selling targeted advertising.

The technology giants want your photos .

The mobile industry is undergoing a real fight market to become your favorite place to store all those precious memories you keep in who knows how many memory cards, hard drives and mobile devices.

“As techniques such as image analysis , auto labels, face recognition and computer vision systems improve, the information that can be inferred from a photograph is immense, “he told the BBC Geoff Blaber of tech consultancy CCS Insight.

“This means that by default images have a clear value for companies that are financed from the sale of targeted advertising “he said, as Google and Facebook.

You want to store your data and they want

In this context, last week Google announced during its annual conference for developers large I / O a new application for storing pictures and videos, Google Photos , with which it wants to compete with the iCloud Apple and his new photo app and the redesigned Flickr app Yahoo .

In addition, the storage facilities are generally as Dropbox and onedrive of Microsoft.

Everyone wants to be your base for archiving, organizing and to share your images, thereby achieving move to Facebook , which until now is the number one destination for photo sharing.

For users there are obvious advantages in being able to have a copy Photo security in the cloud and to access them anytime, from anywhere.

But at what price ? Here we tell you the pros and cons of three services. Google, Apple and Yahoo

Google Photos, seduction of the unlimited

Photos presnetación of during the conference Google I / O Google 2015

The great weapon of marketing this application released last week is that besides being free is “ unlimited .”

It works in both Android and iOS , and automatically organizes images of users, who are archived on Google servers.

The application can further improve your photos with filters and editing tools create photo montages about music, animations and can create links to share pictures with your contacts.

Also you can use a search engine to find very specific images without you having previously labeled as if you had a kind of Google search within your own library of images, perfect to locate that particular photo that years ago you do not see.

Another interesting aspect is that without labeling the location of the photos, the application can infer where they were taken to identify objects in images.

Applications are getting smarter when it comes to interpreting the contents of images. Perhaps infer that this photo was taken in Mexico.

For example, you can deduct that these photos are because there is a Paris Eiffel Tower in one of them.

Does trick? Some think so

On the one hand free and unlimited features come at a cost. Photos and videos are stored to a lower resolution , so They are compressed if they are over 16MP .

Although it is barely perceptible to the eye of an ordinary user, for the most concerned about the quality this can be a problem.

For them Google offers a premium service that keeps the photos in their original format to a maximum of 15GB free.

Then, costs $ 2 a month for 100GB or 10 a month for 1TB (1000GB or 1TB can store 300,000 photos, depending on size).

On the other hand, the skeptics feel mistrust to give users to Google privacy on a tray.

“There is no doubt that Google Photos is a Mass grabbing personal data , at a time when the images are the largest social currency internet “wrote Natasha Lomas , journalist tech site TechCrunch .

” As more than a decade ago Google launched a service for e-mail much more storage capacity will attract users of other e-mail, is now repeating the trick with the photos, “he said.

” And what is the price of their “free unlimited storage “? You are giving Google a unimpeded access to all the sights (and associated information) of your camera. “

The new Photos app Apple

We are approaching the end of chaos in our bibliotecsa images. will be difficult to lose view past memories.

In April Apple released photos for iOS, Mac OS and Internet.

The functionalities of the Apple service are very similar to that of Google: Photos app also lets you organize, browse, edit and share your photos easily

But perhaps the great advantage of the service is to the fans. Brand, who allows unhindered navigation on all Apple mobile devices, whether iPhones, iPads or MacBooks.

On the other hand, unlike Google Photos, the storage service iCloud It is only free up to 5GB.

Then, 200GB will cost you $ 4 a month, and 500GB $ 10 a month.

Like Google Photos, Photos of Apple also has a option that lets you automatically upload to the cloud the new pictures of your devices.

Flickr, Yahoo’s updated

In early May bastion presented Flickr a new version of its website, its computer applications and mobile devices and search services.

Flicker still enjoys a large user base, but has been slow to incorporate services improvements were already technically possible.

Flickr offers users free storage from 2013 and all resolutions up 1TG (1000GB) of photos and videos.

That decision helped raise about 100 million users.

The updated Flickr services allow you to store, edit, organize, search and share photos in an easier way.

One of the most notable changes in May is the ability to “self-labeling” and image recognition functions in which it competes directly with Google service.

The “Magic View” function recognizes If your photos are automatically pan, a screenshot, a portrait, a sunset, etc.

The system also “learns” when the user corrects a wrong label automatically. For example, if Flickr identifies a motorcycle like a bicycle.

And like Google’s system, you can make specific searches for photos.

Flickr still enjoys a large user base, but has been slow to incorporate improvements to its services that were already technically possible.

That allowed giant rivals such as Google, Apple, Amazon or Dropbox and small emerging companies, attracting new users and made Flickr lose some of the force it had in its early days.

Other services

How much your photos say about you?

But there are many more content storage services in the cloud that can be an alternative to upload your photos to the Internet.

Dropbox also allows you to back Automatic your photos from your camera phone.

We organize photos by date and accessible from any device. You can also create and share photo albums. The basic free account comes with 2GB capacity, but you can have a premium service 1TB for about $ 12 a month.

onedrive of Microsoft offers 15GB free with the most basic account. If you need more space you can have 200GB for $ 3.99 a month or 1TB by 6.99 per month.