Can Google launch a new product and not see it sink like a mafia victim thrown into the sea with a concrete block tethered to their ankles?

Bad analogies aside, the answer is surprisingly yes, with the search giant announcing Tuesday that Google Photos has hit over 100 million users, remarkably only five months since it launched.

The 100 million user number may not seem much when considered that Facebook has over 1 billion users and Instagram has 400 million, but it needs to be considered how long those services took to get to those lofty numbers; it took services including Twitter and Pinterest five years to reach the 100 million user mark, and in Instagram‘s case it took 2.5 years.

Google Photos originally came out of Google’s latest failed attempt at social networking, Google+, and offers users a wealth of features that are often only found in part with competitors including Flickr and Apple’s iPhoto; of note Flickr itself only has 112 million users, although many of those would not still be actively using the service.

Along with the announcement, Google shared a number of facts about the service, with probably the most practical being that they claim to have freed up 3,720 terabytes of storage on users’ smartphones thanks to its auto-upload feature.

Other (perhaps not as interesting) facts shared include Paris being the top photographed location globally, followed by New York and Barcelona.

“Babies” are the top searched-for term, and users created 15 million GIFs using the service.

If you’re a cat person you may be disappointed with next fact: people take more photos of dogs than any other animal, including cats.

It works

The strength of Google Photos is it just works, although the provision of 15GB of free storage does help along the way, particularly compared to the 2GB Dropbox offers when it comes to backing photos off a smartphone.

Credit needs to be given to Google with the service, particularly given that Google Photos is essentially a spin-off from the horror that is Google+; spinning off the service as a standalone app was always going to be a big risk, but they not only did it, they did it well.

If you’ve not tried Google Photos before you can sign up for the service here.

Image credit: 10oreo/Flickr/CC by 2.0