What Do To Do With Photos
iPhone vs. Google Pixel 3, Apple Photos vs. Google Photos
The Teardown
Tuesday :: January 15th, 2019
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In my December 4th newsletter, I briefly described this newsletter’s publishing journey from MailChimp to Substack. A few of you like the Substack format because of the consistent reading experience across devices and email clients. I’m enjoying the writing-focused experience from the publisher angle, but Mailchimp’s reader reporting is miles ahead. However, it’s important to use whatever is resonating most with subscribers.
My simple ask is this: check out links below and tell me which one you like more. Feel free to respond directly to this newsletter over email, or send me a quick message in the Slack channel. Let me know!
Substack Format - Curation, Taste, Scooters
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The Cameras In Our Phones
Family holiday gatherings bring out all of our best emotions. We re-imagine our appreciation for family members by buying them gifts, clinking glasses full of alcoholic punch, and embarrassing each other with stories about the past. We also capture lots of photos. Many are good, many are not, and all of them are passed to others through various communication channels such as shared albums, or text message, or if you’re my family — a sprawling WhatsApp group.
This year, I arrived at these gatherings armed with the latest photo-quality killer-device — the iPhone XS. Apple’s selfie-enhancing portrait feature is uniquely powerful on the XS. I’m taking lots of photos these days and wanted the best of the best.
After buying the phone, a family member labeled me an Apple fanboy. He wanted a new phone but was moderately disgusted by the idea of paying Apple prices when plenty of acceptable alternatives exist. But he gazed over my shoulder as I snapped thousands of pictures of my seven-month-old and concluded: “wow, these pictures are amazing — I need to get one of these phones.”
High-quality cameras are standard in numerous higher-end phones. Google’s Pixel 3, for example, reconstructs the quality of low-light photos using sophisticated machine learning algorithms. The result is a low-light photo with less noise — something many photographers struggle to achieve. Apple quietly upgraded the camera in the XS with larger imagery-consuming sensors, leapfrogging many other similarly rated competitors.
All of these highlights led me to wonder whether the phone matters anymore. Most higher-quality phones capture great photos. Most of us probably don’t care to own an actual camera nor would we know much about choosing the best one for our needs.
Does it matter what phone you use?
Photos-As-A-Platform
More than ever, what matters is how we share our photos. Only in niche situations will someone ask you how you constructed a perfectly curated life. We tune our public image on Instagram, build our portfolio on VSCO, and amass all other photos within a variety of ecosystems such as Apple’s iCloud or Google’s Photos products.
I’m sure most of you are like me: you store more photos than you share. I’ve tried and failed to devise a strategy to retain only photos I enjoy, but luckily, the aforementioned platforms perform lots of heavy lifting for me. Both provide simple tools to tag and organize photos. They also use algorithmic techniques to suggest edits, photos, and bonus items such as still-photo animations. It should come as no surprise that these platforms accomplish this wizardry in different ways. Apple’s privacy stance means their intelligence lives entirely on devices. By contrast, Google is happy to slickly group and animate in exchange for a cloud-based experience. Privacy hawks may think of the latter as an unacceptable trade-off, but the vast majority of mobile users don’t care.
I think Apple’s platform is superior. iOS users can edit photos and create videos and animations using Apple-native software, and in parallel download and use Google’s device-agnostic software. For obvious reasons, Android users only have Google products at their disposal.
We can breakdown these various advantages and disadvantages in two simple bullets:
The photo-taking device matters less
The photo-storage and manipulation platform matters more
Both the Apple iPhone XS and the Google Pixel 3 — the top-tier phones — capture amazing photos. However, photo organization on Apple’s platform is still confusing at a time when Google’s platform excels at centralizing and organizing. I possess extra iCloud storage, but I don’t use that space to organize my library. I upload everything I shoot via the Google Photos app and distribute from there. When I prefer to share to a specific group without worrying about the platform, I send text or WhatsApp group messages.
However, all of this boils down to an opportunity cost. Apple’s success is partially predicated on the simplicity of its user experience. Phone owners use a device devoid of cruft with two key default applications: Maps and Photos. Both benefit from Apple’s design prowess, but more importantly, from their prominence in iOS. Google’s Maps and Photos experiences are by many accounts superior, but neither platform is installed by default on iOS device. The numbers speak the truth: iOS users overwhelmingly chose Apple Maps over Google Maps. So, it’s easy to extrapolate and assume — without actual numbers — that iOS users also use the Apple default photo ecosystem. How much better need a Google product be to incur a switching cost and move their photo management to Google? 10%? 30%?
The question is difficult to answer, but Apple users don’t need to care — they can easily use either photo management platform because they can access both.