It’s official. Google Photos now has a billion users on the service, a milestone that took the image sharing-and-storage service a little more than four years to reach.

The search giant first shared the information with FastCompany. Google Photos putting a billion users in the rear-view mirror makes it the ninth Google-owned service to do so. The others are (in no particular order): Gmail, Google Maps, Android, YouTube (oh, so much YouTube…), Chrome, Google Drive, the Google Play store, and Google itself. The iconic search page, that is.

Blasting off again

Google Photo’s four-year climb to the summit of Mount Billion took a little over four years. That might seem like a lengthy period of time but it’s actually remarkably fast. Four years is about half the time for a service to climb as high as Google’s Photos has managed.

By comparison, Google’s flagship product (after search. And Android. And YouTube. And… you know what, never mind) Gmail took nearly 12 years to hit 1 billion users. It pulled off that milestone back in 2016. Facebook-owned Instagram launched in 2010 and only hit a billion in 2018. Facebook itself launched in 2004 and had to wait till 2012 for the 1 billion mark. WhatsApp hit a billion daily users in 2017, after launching in 2009. Halving that time is an impressive feat on its own.

Hit up the FastCompany report to find some extra information about how Google Photos grew, mushroom-like, from the er… remnants of Google+. Up next for Google Photos? The launch of Gallery Go, a low-resource image storage, editing, and management suite for Android. The download is relatively teeny (10MB) but offers users editing and organisation without too much recourse to the internet. Makes sense. Gallery Go was designed for locations where data is at a premium, after all.

Source: FastCompany via 9to5Google