Meet Google’s new Gallery Go, an offline, lightweight alternative to Google Photos

Meet Google's new Gallery Go, an offline, lightweight alternative to Google Photos

Gallery Go is a new app from Google designed to let people with unreliable internet connections organize and edit their photos. Like Google’s regular Photos app it uses machine learning to organize your photos. You can also use it to auto-enhance your pictures and apply filters. The difference is that Gallery Go is designed to work offline, and takes up just 10MB of space on your phone.

Gallery Go is just the latest lightweight version of an app designed for developing markets like Nigeria, where Google announced the new app. Facebook has produced “Lite” versions of the main Facebook app, as well as Messenger and Instagram, and Twitter has done the same with the Twitter Lite app. Google has even done something similar on the OS level with Android Go, a lightweight operating system based on Android that’s designed to run on inexpensive smartphones lacking powerful processing.

This comes as good news for the company because Gmail took a dozen years to hit a billion users; Facebook and Instagram, about eight years apiece. Which makes Google Photos’ growth spurt not only impressive but unusually rapid.

A major reason for the growth spurt could be the fact that Google Photos ships preinstalled on Android phones. This is a powerful mechanism for getting it in front of vast quantities of new users. Not to forget that its also available on the web.

Google’s new photos app is available now to download in the Play Store. To run it, you’ll need a device that’s running Android 8.1 Oreo or higher.

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