Google Photos is more than an exciting—and hugely transforming—new product. The app/cloud service is a metaphor for an escalating mobile business model that, with perhaps the exception of Facebook, no competitor has the capacity to match.
Users gain tremendous time-saving utility, such as the ability to meaningfully search using innocuous terms like “dog” or “Washington”, all without the need to manually add metadata tags by way of applications like Photoshop. Meanwhile, Google gets access to quantifiable information, in the image and accompanying metadata, around which to sell advertising and related contextual content or services.
