The iPhone comes with a great Photos app from Apple, but Google also offers a Photos app, so which one is best? Each has pros and cons, so let's look at what they have to offer iPhone users.

A few years ago, Google Photos was a long way ahead of Apple Photos and it was beating it by a wide margin in several areas. It was brilliant and it had more features and better AI than the Photos app built into iOS. However, Apple has clearly put a lot of effort into improving Photos and it has caught up with Google's app and may be even better in some areas, although Google still beats it in others.

Google Photos is a free iOS app that requires a free Google account to store your photos. Since most people already have a Google account, you can install the app and immediately start using it. Google Photos backs up all your photos and videos and stores them online in your Google account. They can be viewed on the iPhone in the app or on the web at photos.google.com in any web browser on any computer or tablet.

Photo storage

Provided photos are under 16 megapixels, Google will store an unlimited number for free. You can shoot and shoot and not worry about how many gigabytes of space they need. The only time you might hit the 16-megapixel size limit is when taking a very wide panorama. Photos over 16 megapixels are downsized (you can pay to keep originals though).

Photos do not even use any of the 15GB of free online storage that comes with a Google account. They are separate. What's more, the app can clear photos from the iPhone once they are safely stored online. That means the phone storage will never be filled.

Apple Photos stores images on the phone and to store them online and sync them with other devices requires paying for extra iCloud storage. The 5 GB of free storage provided by Apple with iCloud is too limited to be any use, but the 50 GB plan is very cheap, costing less than a dollar/pound a month. This will not be sufficient for some people, but a lot of photos can be stored in 50 GB, so I am OK with it.

Google Photos wins when it comes to storage.

Browsing photos

Google Photos and Apple Photos both have a browse mode where you can see all photos in chronological order. Apple Photos simply shows them in a grid with all the images exactly the same size.

Google Photos creates collage-style layouts and highlights some photos in a tall or wide format. This is an attractive style that is more visually pleasing. Videos auto-play too. It makes your photos more interesting and more fun to browse.

Apple overlays the date on the top of the screen, but Google organizes photos by date, which I find better.

Google Photos wins when it comes to browsing photos.

Automatic photo organization

At one time we had to manually create albums and put photos in them, such as a trip, holiday, birthday, wedding and so on. You can still do that, but both Google and Apple Photos automatically create albums for you.

Select the Library tab in Google photos and there are many automatically generated albums with descriptive titles like Trip to X, Weekend in Y, Sunday afternoon in Z, and so on. The album contains all the related photos, some in a collage layout, and a Google map. You can edit them, change the order and so on.

In Apple Photos, go to the For You tab and tap See All next to Memories. It creates lots of great albums, such as events that occurred, places you visited, people over the years. They contain slide shows with music, a collage-style photo layout, people and places.

Both apps are excellent and there isn't much to choose between them, but Apple Photos auto-generated memories a bit more personal, covering friends, family and pets, whereas Google tends to show trips, holidays and events.. They come up with different albums containing different photos and it is good to have both apps.

It is hard to pick a winner and both are excellent, but maybe Apple Photos if I had to choose.

Searching for photos

Both Google and Apple photos use AI to determine what is in your photos and this enables you to search for a wide range of things without having to manually add labels. For example, you can search for people, pets, animals, photos of beaches, weddings and so on.

Both apps are very good at finding things in photos or photos of a particular nature, however Google is slightly better. Type in a vague concept like 'party' and Google Photos will find and show you photos of parties, whereas Apple Photos shows nothing because it does not understand what a party is.

Google Photos is slightly ahead in understanding what a photo is about and this makes search a bit better.

Integration with other apps

This is where Apple Photos really stands out and the Photos library is part of iOS. Every app that works with photographs can access the Photos library and open and save photos. Google Photos is just another app that can access the Photos library. You could not use an app to access in Google Photos.

Apple Photos wins here because it is the default iOS photo storage.

Extra features

I like the intelligent tools that Google Photos has. If you shoot two slightly overlapping photos, it notifies you a day or two later that they have been automatically combined into a panoramic view. You can see it and save it if you want.

A common way to make photos more interesting is to use a photo app or Instagram to apply filters and effects. Every now and then, Google Photos will notify you that it found an interesting photo and applied special effects to it. You can view the results and save it if you want to keep it. It is another really clever feature.

Google clearly has some computer algorithms that periodically scan you photos looking for overlapping ones to turn into panoramas, looking for interesting photos to apply special effects to, and so on. It doesn't happen a lot, but it is enough to make it worthwhile.

Conclusion: Google vs Apple Photos

Fortunately, you don't have to choose between Apple Photos and Google Photos. Apple's app is part of iOS and it is where the camera stores photos. It is not an option and you must have it.

Google Photos is very similar in many ways and there is a lot of overlap in features and functions, but it does beat it in several ways and I recommend having it on your iPhone since it won't cost you anything.