Google Photos is Google's best service — here's why you should be using it

There are moments in life when your phone's camera is crucial: your child's first steps, or their graduation from high school, for instance.

But your phone is likely full of stuff, and you could end up facing this obnoxious message:

There are few things as frustrating in our convenience-filled world as repeatedly running into your phone's storage limit. It means an action as simple as taking a photo is delayed while you free up space ... often by deleting old photos.

For most people hitting that storage limit, there's one culprit: photos. 

They take up a lot of space, and you take a lot of them — you might even be taking "HDR" photos (which are even larger files than standard photos). So, what do you do? You have two main options:

1. Buy a phone with more internal storage, which costs more money.
2. Regularly offload photos and delete them from your phone, which costs your time.

But there's a third, totally free, amazingly simple option: Google Photos. Here's everything you should know about Google's secret-best service.

If you have a Google account — Gmail, for instance — you already have Google Photos.

It's true, and it's incredibly simple:

-Navigate to photos.google.com (while signed in to your Gmail account).

-Start using Google Photos!

If, for some reason, you don't already have a Google account, you'll need one to use Google Photos. Signing up is free and easy.

But let's not kid ourselves — y0u probably have a Google account already, right? Almost certainly.

But you're here to free up space on your phone, right? For that you're going to need the Google Photos app — it's available for free on both the iTunes App Store and Google Play:

The app is really where the best Google Photos stuff is. I'll explain why momentarily, but first and foremost you need download links — here they are:

-iTunes App store

-Google Play store

Now that you've got the app installed, what's so good about it? While there are many answers to that question, prime among them is Google Photos' "Back up & Sync" function.

Despite logic dictating that you should click the "Free up space" option in the main menu, the first place you should navigate is the "Back up & Sync" menu in Settings. 

This is the main reason that Google Photos is so great: It takes your entire photo library — every photo you've ever taken on your phone, as well as screenshots and photos taken within Instagram and whatever else — and uploads it to the internet. The photos remain private, hidden behind your Google account information, but now you can access them anywhere. On your laptop? Yep. On a new phone? Yep. On your tablet? Yep, there too. 

This unto itself is pretty incredible — but what's even more incredible is what this means for the concept of storing photos on your phone. Specifically: You can straight up delete your entire photo library, thus freeing up a tremendous amount of your phone's free space.