New Google Photos app for iOS and Android has free and unlimited storage

Google has announced an update to its Android application Photos which brings free, unlimited cloud storage of high quality photos and HD videos, along with new organisation features.

Announced at the company's annual Google I/O developer conference, the new Photos app organises photos in a similar way to Apple's iOS app of the same name. Images are ordered chronologically and can be found quickly by searching by day, month or year.

The app also orders all photos based on who is in them. Google automatically recognises faces in every photo and groups them together based on people in your phone's contacts book. Google's facial recognition is so powerful it can group together all photos of a single person from the day they were born to present day.

By understanding what is in the photo (and when and where they were taken) the app can also find images based on searches like "snow storm in New York". No photos need to be stored locally on your smartphone or tablet - indeed, the demonstration at Google I/O showed the app running with all images stored in the cloud.

Speaking of cloud storage, users of Photos can backup an unlimited number of images (up to 16 megapixels) and videos (up to 1080p HD quality) for free. Google Photos, plus the new unlimited and free storage service is available now for Android and iOS, and on the web.

To select many photos at once, instead of tapping each individually, you can tap and hold on one, then drag down the screen to select many rows of images at a time. From here, you can tap the 'get a link' option and send the link to a friend.

They, having not logged into any Google service, can view all of the images at photos.google.com in high quality. Users who are logged into Google can instantly save these images to their library.