Google Photos With Free, Unlimited Storage: 10 Things You Need to Know

Google on Thursday unveiled a brand new feature for storing and managing photos and videos called Google Photos. The service is completely independent of Google Plus, the company's attempt at creating a social network that failed to take off but won praise for its photo management capabilities. Here are 10 things you need to know about Google Photos:

1. It's free and it's unlimited. You can store as many photos and videos as you want on Google Photos and Google will happily store full resolution versions of your memories for free. All images are stored on the cloud, freeing up space on your local device.

2. Did we say full resolution? Well, almost. With Google Photos free storage, you are restricted to 16-megapixel images and 1080p videos - anything bigger will be downscaled to those sizes. Also note that even if you upload an image that's 16-megapixels or less, Google will not retain your original photos. Google Photos saves pictures as a high-quality compressed jpg that's "near-visually identical but takes lot less storage." That's fine for almost everyone, except serious photographers.

3. If you wish to save higher resolution, raw media, or retain the original picture as it is, you can do it on Google Drive, just like you've been doing it before Google Photos was introduced. Google offers 15GB storage free that's shared between your Gmail, Google Drive, and Google+ accounts, and you can bump this up to 1TB at just $9.99 (Rs. 650 approximately) a month.

4. Unfortunately, you have to choose between  the free, unlimited plan called 'High Quality' and the Google Drive option called the 'Original' plan. You can't be on the free Google Photos plan and have your higher resolution media stored full size on Google Drive.

5. Google Drive is available as an app for Android and iOS, with a Web interface thrown in for good measure. If you want to upload photos from a computer, use the Google Photos backup desktop uploader for Windows or Mac, which might have been an ideal solution for some. You can still browse through pictures on your device as if they were stored locally.

6. Google Photos will automatically recognise and group photos of various people, places, and things without you needing to add tags. It can figure out faces even with changing age - so it will automatically recognise your college-going kid's pictures all the way back to when she was born.

7. What would a Google service be without awesome search? Google Photos can recognise objects in images, so if you type 'cycling' or 'doors,' it will return all photos that have those activities or objects. It can even recognise specific breeds of dogs or stuff like "photos with food in Hawaii."

8. Google Photos comes with a built-in editor that will let you touch-up photos. However, if you are like us you probably end up making pictures worse when you try playing with those confusing sliders. Don't worry, Google Photos has an auto-fix button that will improve your pictures by fixing brightness and other aspects of the image.

9. There are other cool features like the ability to create intelligent collages, panoramas, and animated gifs from multiple images. You can select multiple images by simply sliding your finger instead of having to tap each picture individually. You can also share pictures with anyone, even if they don't have Google Photos.

10. While Apple has a similar offering, the free plan offers limited storage and, of course, works only with Apple devices. Flickr is perhaps the closest competitor with 1TB storage for free. Amazon offers unlimited free space for photos but not videos. No one quite offers the extra features of Google Photos.

visit Google Photos now:Google Photos

Review of $29.39 Xiaomi Small Ants Smart IP Camera

Xiaomi is a very versatile company. We know of it as primarily a phone maker, but it does a lot of other things and does them well too. It makes power banks, earphones, fitness bands, tablets… hell! it even makes televisions.

Xiaoyi is a subsidiary of Xiaomi that makes cameras. Its two products that are vastly different from each other. One is an action camera touted to be the ‘GoPro killer’ while the other is one piece in the Smart Home whole. The latter is the camera I will be talking about here. You can buy one for yourself from Gearbest.com.

The Xiaoyi ‘Small Ants’ Smart Camera is an IP camera, which means you can hook it up to your WiFi and remotely monitor the feed from your phone. If you already think that’s cool just look at the list of features below:

• 720p HD video capture
• Built-in microphone and speaker, supports two-way remote dialogue
• Automatically starts smart security model when you leave home
• Observe the pictures and video whenever necessary
• 4x digital zoom, every detail can be viewed on the screen
• 110-degree wide-angle lens can capture everything even in a large room
• Playback at any time, in addition to real-time viewing, it supports a micro SD(TF)
  memory card up to 32 GB to store videos
• Perfect fit for Xiaomi AC router, you can record videos directly to the router’s 1TB hard drive
• Cloud Video: Yes, supports local cloud (more secure)
• Supported Protocols: IPV4, UDP, TCP, HTTP, RTP/RTSP, DHCP, P2P
• Supported Wireless Standards: 802.11b/g/n

And like all other Xiaomi devices we have ever seen, this camera is also priced insanely low at USD $29.39.

Installation Experience:

My review unit from Gearbest arrived in a nice white box. As soon as I opened the box, I was greeted with the actual camera staring up at me. I removed it and found the charger and USB cable. Ready to get it working as soon as I could, I found the user guide inside the box and unfolded it. All the instructions were in Chinese. No kidding!

All I could make out from that guide was that I needed some kind of app on my phone to make it work. Googling for the app I stumbled upon the miui forums. There I found the link to the site where I could get the app. The link loaded and again, Chinese. The whole page was in Chinese. I guessed at the download button and was lucky after a couple of tries. The app ‘XiaoYi Camera’ was now installed on my android. Thankfully the app was in English.

The instructions were pretty straightforward, but I could not make the camera connect to the app. After much googling and cursing, I found that my proxy network WiFi was the culprit. So I moved on to using a no proxy WiFi router. No dice. I searched some more and found that the camera is compatible with two more apps one of which is the ‘Mi Smart Home’ app. Installed this app and followed the instructions and in no time I was looking at myself staring at the camera with an ‘I beat you’ expression.

The camera set-up is a breeze once you know the right app and the right network it works with. I did not, so I struggled with it. I hope you are reading this review before getting caught in the struggle.

App for controlling Xiomi IP camera:
iPhone users can get the app here.
Android users can download the app from play store.

Usability

I tested it with the Mi Home Android app only. The app showed the feed in HD by default which was at a delay of 3 to 4 seconds. The quality of the feed depends on the speed of your internet connection. For me, it worked better in SD quality. The feed was clear and consistent and even the audio was not too shabby.

The camera has some neat features like the two-way remote dialog. Press the mic button on the app, speak into the phone and your voice comes out from the tiny speaker located on the back of the camera. The speaker is not too loud or clear but gets the work done. There are no other buttons on the camera save the tiny pinhole button to reset the camera while you are setting it up or moving it up across networks. The camera records only when it senses movements which conserves space on the storage device. This feature works as advertised. Sadly, No night mode capability.

It officially supports micro-SD cards of up to 32GB but some people on the forums claim to have used a 64GB one too. The cards need to be class 10 though. We tested with a 16GB card and faced no hiccups whatsoever. A card is required to update the firmware of the device so keep that in mind when you are buying this.

The Mi Home app is intended as an all-in-one smart home app. You can use it to setup other Mi/Yi devices and control them using it. The cool feature in the app is that if you buy more than one Yi Small Ants camera, you can tag them and watch their feed from the same screen by simply swiping across to the other one. Just set up a few cameras and you have your own CCTV network for surveillance right from your phone.

The base of the camera has screw holes to mount the camera on walls or anything vertical. If you want to keep it on a table or someplace horizontal, the base is sturdy and slip-proof and the neck can be tilted to a wide variety of degrees. The adapter cable is  about a meter and a half long which is long enough in case you don’t mount it too high on the wall.

Verdict

The camera is great value for money like all devices from Xiaomi. The video feed is clear and the wide-angle lens captures  a lot more of the scene. Once you have it setup, you will love this camera for the feature set it provides for the price.

Here are some more pictures of Xiaoyi Small Ants Camera:

Buy the Xiaoyi Small Ants Camera from Gearbest here and tell us your experiences in comments below.