Google Photos is the Swiss Army knife of photo management—it does a lot, does it well, and has become so ubiquitous that you probably already use it without thinking about it.

The AI features are legitimately impressive. The search is borderline magical, the editing tools are accessible enough for casual users but powerful enough to be useful, and the automatic backup has saved countless families from losing irreplaceable memories when phones get lost or broken.

But let's address the elephant in the cloud: Google's AI is looking at every single photo you upload. That's how the search works, how it organizes faces, how it suggests albums. For many families, this trade-off (convenience for privacy) is worth it. For others, it's a dealbreaker. There's no wrong answer, but you should make that choice consciously.

The storage monetization is real but not predatory. You get 15GB free, which is genuinely generous, but active families will hit that limit eventually. The upsell to Google One is straightforward, not manipulative.

Bottom line: This is a solid family tool that makes digital life easier. It's not going to teach your kids critical thinking or spark creative genius, but it'll help you find that photo of the birthday cake from 2019 in about three seconds, and sometimes that's exactly what you need.