Google Photos is for a camera roll. Peak is for your work.

Google Photos backs up in Original quality, or in Storage saver, which resizes photographs above 16 megapixels down to 16 and may convert them to JPEG. Every quality counts toward your Google storage — 15 GB free, shared with Gmail and Drive.

Peak keeps every upload as the original file: the bytes you upload are the bytes you download, EXIF included.

Culling in Google Photos is a single Favorite. Peak has the vocabulary photographers cull with — 0 to 5 stars, picks and rejects — on the keyboard, across a whole shoot.

Google Photos searches by words: “dog”, “beach”, text inside a photo, a person once you have named them. Peak does not search by words. It answers “this blue” and “frames like this one”, and keeps a burst of one moment apart from a picture that merely resembles it.

A shared album opens for anyone with the link and takes comments and likes; Google documents no way for a client to pick photographs for you, and no end date for a link.

A Peak room lets a client pick, rate and comment, tells you what they chose, closes on a date you set, and can remove the location from the files themselves.

On a phone: automatic backup of everything the camera takes, and search by what is in the picture. Peak does neither. Many photographers will keep both — the phone in one, the work in the other.