Google, Inc. has upped the ante in the photo storage space by launching Google Photos Thursday, complete with unlimited storage and some new, nifty features.

The new service, which is a spin-off of the photo service from Google’s little used Google+ social network, offers a similar, easy to use interface that embraces a users’ photographs and makes uploading and storing them painless.

On the storage front, Google Photo’s offers unlimited storage, but with a catch: uploaded photos are optimized for hosting, which won’t affect the use of the service for 99.9% of people. Photographers, or photo purists who prefer or work with higher resolution photographs, particularly those using the RAW format, can still use the service with two options: free storage up to 15GB, or unlimited storage for $10 per a month.

Google notes though that users will not see a difference with photo compression, saying that that they maintain the original resolution up to 16MP for photos, and 1080p high-definition for videos, and store compressed versions of the photos and videos in beautiful, print-quality resolution.

The additional features are what makes the new service not only interesting, but potentially a market killer.

In what Google calls “organized by what matters,” it indexes photographs based on what’s in them. The takes place in two different ways: initially Exif data from the photograph is utilized to place where the photo is taken. In the second stage, each photo itself is analyzed for what is in it.

To give some examples: a search for “baseball” might bring up every picture you’ve taken at a baseball game based on Google detecting what is in the photo (you don’t have to tag it or label it,) as would a search for “beach” would do likewise for pictures of beaches.

Google says that the system is not 100 percent perfect at this time, but will evolve and most users will find it works when they are searching for items within photographs.

Other features include instant adjustments tuned to the photo’s color, lighting, and subject “to make each photo look its best” and the app, impressively, allows users to create their own collages, animations, movies with soundtracks, and more.

“We aspire to do for photo management what Gmail did for email management” Bradley Horowitz, Google’s Vice President of Streams, Photos, and Sharing told Steven Levy on Backchannel. “Gmail wasn’t the first email service, but it offered a different paradigm of how one managed one’s inbox.”

“We want to do that for photo management: to give you enough storage so you can relax and not worry about how much photo bandwidth you’re consuming, and enough organizing power so you don’t have to think about the tedium of managing your digital gallery.”

“It will happen for you transparently, in the background. I don’t think there’s another company on earth that can make that claim.”

The new Google Photos is available now on Android, iOS, and the web, but there was no word as to whether they’d be bringing a desktop client out for the service, similar to what they have previously offered with Picasa or as Apple does with iPhoto.