You hardly need to have advanced too many years to remember a time when photography was something reserved for holidays and special occasions.

If you fancied yourself as the next David Bailey, it might be that you would pack an extra reel with your luggage, only to stand in a queue at Boots two weeks later waiting to pay through the nose for half a dozen over-exposures. About 15 years ago, digital photography became a thing. I had one of the first Kodak cameras that required no film. It was a vast bulk of plastic that would obscure your entire head when in use.

Transferring snaps to a computer took almost as long as the traditional chemical process thanks to a connection through the PC’s printer port. When I look back at some of those earliest digital snaps I am amazed by the dreadful quality of pictures that look like they were taken behind a sheet of cloth.

The fidelity of those initial forays into digital photography was spectacular compared to the horrors produced by the world’s first smartphone snaps. I have precious moments of my young daughter captured on an early model Windows phone (don’t judge me –they were all the rage back then). At least I am assuming that the barely coloured smudge sitting on a playground swing is her. Who knows?

Today it seems like every new gadget on the market must come with a built-in camera. In a single generation, nearly all of us have ditched those old point and shoots in favour of the phone we carry all the time.

As recently as a couple of years ago, my aunt would be the laughing stock when she pulled out some ancient shooter at family events and confused the youngsters with strange winding movements between snaps. When she revealed a digital camera last Christmas, the entire gathering broke into spontaneous applause and welcomed her to the 21st century.

These days we have a different problem to contend with. Rather than finding the one poignant picture from a precious batch of 24, we are instead faced with hundreds of shots in high resolution and we don’t know what to do with them all.

At a recent visit to Paris, I stood gazing at the Eiffel Tower as a taxi pulled up. Its driver got out and under instruction went to the front of his car to photograph his passengers waving out the windows with the famous structure in the background. He then got back in and drove off with those inside never actually turning around to experience the spectacle with their own eyes.

Google has just updated its Photos app. The company is now offering unlimited storage free and has promised that it will never directly monetise the service, meaning you won’t have to watch adverts before reliving some prized moment. Perhaps best of all, the new app will automatically suggest the best picture from a batch, leaving you to approve its choice. It also uses Google’s search mechanism to help you find things.

After uploading more than 10,000 pictures, I searched for “rainbow” and it found a couple of old snaps with a rainbow present.

Impressive stuff.