Google’s smash hit photo app Google Photos is continuing its phenomenal run with the company announcing at its annual I/O conference Wednesday that the app now has over 200 million active users.

On top of the 200 million active users, which is double the figure it reported in October last year, Google also disclosed that the app has now automatically applied two trillion labels (a photo can have more than one label); Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai did disclose that many of these labels were related to selfies, which means there must be a staggeringly large amount of selfies being taken every minute of every day.

“Google Photos shows what’s possible when you approach an existing area from a new perspective,” The Verge reports Pichai as telling the audience.

Google Photos was launched at Google’s last I/O conference 12 months ago as a spinoff of its failed social networking platform Google+, and offers users a wealth of features that are often only found in part in competing apps such as Apple’s iPhoto.

Features include a focus on smart functions such as automatically recognizing what is in each photo and labeling it; that functionality allows users to search for specific items in their photos even when they have not previously tagged the photo.

On top of its smart functions and easy-to-use interface, another great pitch for the app is its promise of unlimited storage, be it with the catch that uploaded photos are optimized for hosting; this is a feature online storage services such as Dropbox, Inc. simply can’t compete with.

It works

12 months, 200 million active users.

Those figures speak for themselves, and credit is due to Google on creating a smash hit product.

“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,” Google’s Vice President of Streams, Photos, and Sharing Bradley Horowitz said at the time Google Photos launched, and it has done just that.

According to App Annie (registration required), Google Photos is currently the 12th most popular photo app in the Apple App Store and the 11th most popular application overall (in all categories) in the Google Play Store.

Image credit: Google