Google Photos, an amped up cloud-based photo storage service, organizer and editor, was one of the big unveils at the Mountain View, Calif. company’s I/O developer conference last week.

Reviewers raved about it. Bloggers bragged it up. Analysts applauded it.

“Google Photos looks amazing,” wrote independent analyst Ben Thompson, on his subscription-based Stratechery.com last week. “And, I might add, it has a killer tagline: Gmail for Photos. It’s so easy to be clear when you’re doing exactly what you were meant to do, and what you are the best in the world at.”

The mainstream media gave Google Photos enough coverage to turn faces an off-shade-envy green in Cupertino (Apple), Menlo Park (Facebook) and Redmond (Microsoft). Maybe Cupertino most of all: Apple likes to think it owns photos. Heck, one of its current ad campaigns relies on striking photographs taken with its iPhone 6 smartphone’s camera.

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