One year on, Google Photos has over 200 million users

One year after making its big debut, Google Photos now has over 200 million active users worldwide. The service has been used to free up 13.7 petabytes of storage on our devices, and to backup 24 billion selfies!

Google designed Photos to be “a home for all your photos and videos, organized and brought to life, so that you can share and save what matters,” the company says. To help with that, it offers free and unlimited storage for “high quality” images.

This is one of the reasons why Photos has become so popular. Users can upload all the images they want and then free up precious storage space on their devices, and it doesn’t cost them a penny. There are also some great features that make the service even more attractive.

Those include an incredible search function that helps you find your photos faster, and the Assistant, which makes wonderful collages, movies, and animations out of your images. Google says it has delivered 1.6 billion of those to date.

Photos could be about to get even greater for Nexus users. According to code in the latest Android update, Google is planning to make storage for “original” photo files — those that haven’t been compressed in any way — free for those with a Google phone.

The company will surely have other big features up its sleeve for the future, too, so if you aren’t already using Photos, now is a great time to start. The service is available on both Android and iOS, and you can download it now from the App Store or Google Play.