I’m delighted to say that Lynda.com has just published my half-hour tour of Google Photos. It’s split into really small, focused chapters (e.g. explaining storage & backup options), so you can jump right to what matters most. Even if you’re not yet a member, you can see one chapter for free, and you can start a free trial to see the whole thing.
The creation process gave me a new appreciation for just how good the Lynda staff is. Scott Erickson, Susan Varnum, and Zach Bobbit were enormously patient in the studio and did heroic editing to keep me from sounding like a tongue-tied doofus. Scott in particular offered great on-the-fly direction, channeling a new user’s perspective & challenging me to rethink, streamline, & clarify. Thanks, guys; you’re a real credit to the whole organization!
Google Photos is of course rapidly developing, adding a bunch of new features in just the last few days, so it would be great to work more with the Lynda team as the product evolves. Feedback, questions, and requests are of course most welcome.
Every day now—literally every day—I look forward to my Assistant showing me memories from this date in the past. I find myself sharing these with lots of friends & family with whom I otherwise wouldn’t connect. Here’s how it works:
Google Photos will now ask whether you’d like to see memories past days. If you say yes, you’ll start receiving Assistant cards containing collages like this one, and tapping them will take you to galleries (example) that you can share with just a tap or two.
It’s kind of like Timehop and Facebook’s memories — but not really. It won’t bother you daily unless you had a worthwhile group of photos to show you. […]
[PM Chris Perry says] “Visual quality of photos is taken into account. No screenshots. We’ll look at photos taken over a longer timespan, something that was more of an ‘event.’ Something that’s going to emotionally resonate. We look at the presence of landmarks. Those get promoted to collages. People are a strong signal that we’ll use to help remind you.”
I can’t tell you just how much I’ve been enjoying this feature as we’ve been testing it, and I hope you enjoy it, too. As always, feedback is most welcome.
Modulo lack of optical zoom, I’ve had more than enough resolution in my iPhone for years. What I want there & in my SLR is more dynamic range. Maybe new tech like this can help deliver it:
“Hmm, what would French intellectuals devise to comment on ‘self-design and the production of sincerity?’” you might just have been asking yourself (or, let’s hope, not). If so, rejoice in knowing that Gregory Chatonsky is on the case:
[He’s] developed a program that pulls tagged Instagram photos of Kim K in real time, and filters them through a software program he made using Unity3d.
The software automatically navigates a generative 3D skin model, created from more than 51,000 pictures of the star. The project looks at the same subject, Kim Kardashian, but is constantly using a different image, creating what the artist describes as a “fascinating difference in the repetition.” […]
“It is simply an extended skin, everything is on the surface. There is nothing to look behind.”
Filmmaker Ian Wood roved all over LA with his remotely piloted craft, capturing lovely, tranquil angles on the grit & grime that I associate with that metropolis.
If that spins your rotor, check out his installment from last year (focusing just on downtown):
“Actually just boarding a flight to Myanmar and Aung San Suu Kyi is on my flight!”
So wrote Josh (then PM for editing in Google+ Photos) back in November 2013, when I’d just started thinking about possible adventures outside of Adobe & proposed that we grab a beer. I’d known Josh for many years in his capacity as the PM for the highly regarded Nik Collection of Photoshop plug-ins (Silver Efex Pro, etc.) prior to their acquisition by Google. When I reached out he was just starting a year+ of travel, photography, and epic beard growth (note to self: sell company to Google!). Once he returned, I encouraged him & my Lightroom friends to chat about ways they could make the world more interesting for visual artists.
Want to remove annoying reflections & other impediments? Check out this demo. As PetaPixel summarizes, “Basically, instead of shooting a single static photo, the photographer captures a short sequence of images while slightly moving the camera around between frames.”
Per the team’s description:
The video accompanying our SIGGRAPH 2015 paper “A Computational Approach for Obstruction-Free Photography”. We present a unified computational approach for taking photos through reflecting or occluding elements such as windows and fences. Rather than capturing a single image, we instruct the user to take a short image sequence while slightly moving the camera. Differences that often exist in the relative position of the background and the obstructing elements from the camera allow us to separate them based on their motions, and to recover the desired background scene as if the visual obstructions were not there. We show results on controlled experiments and many real and practical scenarios, including shooting through reflections, fences, and raindrop-covered windows.
American Ninja Warrior, you’ve got some big fans in our 6- and 7-year-old sons. Inspired by the competitors on that show, the boys put their skills to the test in Lake Tahoe by scrambling up a pier, then leaping off into the sand. It was particularly fun to set my DSLR to burst mode, then capture Finn’s jumps from all angles. After I inserted my memory card & let auto backup run, Google Photos presented me with a bunch of GIF animations. In a few cases there wasn’t enough visual similarity to trigger animation creation, so I simply drag-selected the photos on my iPhone, tapped the “+” button, and chose Animation. Here are a few results if you’re interested.
Dig the effect of a filter in one part of your image, but find it too strong in another part? Use brushing to adjust the mask that controls filter strength & location:
I really admire the workflow speed these guys have been able to achieve, especially now that you can copy/paste settings & share presets. It feels a lot like Lightroom: make adjustments, swipe to the next image, apply previous edits, swipe to the next, etc.
If you go to google.com/maps/timeline and have Location History turned on, you (and only you) can click on specific places you’ve visited, and/or specify particular dates, then see the photos associated with those places/dates. Here’s a screenshot from my travels last month (click for full res):
You can edit or remove any location, or give places personalized, private names like Mom’s House or Sketchy Café. When you’re logged in you’ll see those names right in Google Maps.
Actually giving friends photos (vs. merely sharing them in a hard-to-download/keep manner) is one of my favorite things about Google Photos. When you share a link to one or more images or videos, your recipient can simply click the little “cloud download” icon to add the content to her library. (Try it now with some aircraft/missile photos I shot Monday evening.)
The slightly frustrating thing is that if the images you’re given weren’t recently captured, it can be hard to find them in your library because they’re sorted according to capture date. Fortunately you can easily show recent files: bookmark this link or just click the search bar, then click the “Recently added” tile at the bottom. And boom, whatever files you just added from your friend will now show up at the top of the list.
I got a kick out of this insight into Google’s wearable (and borrowable!) Street View capture devices:
In this episode we’re learning how Google Street View gets off the streets and into some of the crazier places it goes – like the Grand Canyon, the Pyramids of Giza, and the Amazon Jungle.
If you’d like to apply to borrow the Trekker (aka the Google Street View backpack) to map a place you care about, g.co/trekker.
This new Mac app promises to make you a “dope-ass montage in seconds.” I love the ultra simplicity (drop in footage, drop in music, press big red button), though my initial test (using admittedly rough sledding footage) didn’t yield great results. If you take it for a spin (the download is free; you pay to save output), I’d be curious to hear how you like it.
Brush allows working with a finer tip size and deeper zoom
Quick access to online resources: links to Snapseed’s YouTube channel and Google+ page in the Help & feedback menu
Many new languages supported: Català, Dansk, Ελληνικά, English (British), Español (Latinoamérica), Suomi, हिन्दी, Hrvatski, Magyar, Bahasa Melayu, Norsk (Bokmål), Português (Portugal), Română, Slovenčina, Українська, Tiếng Việt
Fixed several crashes and other bugs
The update will be rolling out today on Android devices through the Play Store and on iOS devices through the App Store.
As always, please let us know what you think & where you’d like to see things go next!
Last week Aravind Krishnaswamy (Google Photos engineering manager & my former Photoshop teammate) and I had the pleasure of sitting down with author Jan Kabili to record an episode of This Week in Photo’s The Fix. You can enjoy our handsome mugs (plus demos!) here, or you can listen via iTunes. The 45 minutes flew by for us; hope you dig ‘em.
I’ve often wanted to demo the negligible visual impact of the compression applied by the High Quality option in Google Photos, so I figured I’d register a memorable short URL for the purpose. To my great surprise, I discovered that tinyurl.com/googlephotoscompression was already taken. Clicking through, I found that back in May Brian Young of PetaPixel did a detailed review of compression in Photos. Hopefully it’ll help put folks’ minds further at ease about choosing this option (which I use for everything that comes off my iPhone).
We knew this piece needed a soul, some heart, but not via the traditional history timeline narrative. But what is the story, the words? For inspiration, guidance and insight- we interviewed multiple 90+ Portlanders and spent an evening with each asking all the questions we could about their lives and opinions on a big list of life issues. Our favorite of these amazing people is Katherine Livingston. Her eyes are bright, her wits are sharp, she was born in Portland, her grandfather was involved in commissioning the Skidmore Fountain, she recently held the world record for fastest 2000 meters on a stationary rowing machine for the 95-100 yr old bracket, and this weekend she turns 100 years old. The length of that last sentence should be an indicator of how impactful she was to us. We were honored to sit down and listen to her share her story and insights of living for 100 years. These sentiments became the words that guide the piece.
I’ll be honest—I figured I needed to hear yet more about the “Fearless Genius” of Steve Jobs like I needed a hole in the head. During WWDC, however, I got the very pleasant surprise of hearing photographer Doug Menuez recount stories of documenting a range of Silicon Valley innovators (including the Adobe founders & Russell Brown) 1985-2000. I think you’d enjoy his talk (below) and a selection of images from the book.
You can try, as I did, reading a longish essay from John Lasseter on “Technology and The Evolution of Storytelling,” or you can just spend about 10 seconds watching this footage and go, “Bam, I get it.”
In this film, Steven worked with Team O’Neill surfer and professional athlete Malia Manuel to capture a unique perspective on a single day’s surf session in Western Australia. Utilising drones for the majority of the videography, Steven plays with perspective, taking the viewer into, above, and beyond the waves.
I’ve grudgingly come to accept that most people regard photography much like I regard wine: there’s bad wine, and then there’s wine. I know there’s crap (crummy liturgical stuff, etc.), and I know that all the rest tastes pretty good. Sure, I might notice & like something outstanding, but generally good enough is good enough.
That’s how it is with most people’s photos: “Is it way too dark or blurry? Is my head cut off? No? Fine, then.”
No matter how well or poorly I do my job, most people simply won’t edit photos—at all, ever. They just don’t care. And if they do edit photos, it’ll overwhelmingly be to crop & rotate them, and maybe to brighten things up & add a filter. None of this is unique to Google: we saw exactly the same thing with Adobe Revel (built on the world-class—and for its audience, irrelevant—Lightroom engine).
So, on a per-user basis, editing hardly matters, and yet the scale at which Google operates is enormous, so the editor gets used millions of times. “A small number times a big number is still a big number.”
I’m reminded of an observation from Adam Carolla. Paraphrasing my recollection:
Let’s say you loved watermelon. If someone gave you a watermelon the size of a minivan, you’d probably say, “Wow, that’s a ton of watermelon!!” But then if you realized they carved it out of a watermelon the size of the Hindenburg, you’d probably say, “Come on, that’s all I get?!”
I’m proud of the new Google Photos editor—of the way we were able to radically streamline the UI while retaining tons of smarts under the hood (e.g. centering vignettes on faces, treating faces specially when applying midtone contrast, etc.). And I’m proud of the new Snapseed, which puts big power one tap away for nerds like us. I just have to be happy driving my fruity little minivan next to a Zeppelin—or metaphors to that effect.
Calbuco, as seen by Jonas Dengler and Martin Heck:
They write,
Volcano Calbuco erupted on April 22, 2015, for the first time in four decades. Located close to the cities of Puerto Varas and Puerto Montt in southern Chile. We (Jonas Dengler and Martin Heck) spend the prior couple of days on the neighboring volcano Osorno (~20km linear distance) shooting timelapses. After an amazing night under the night sky we took the cable car downwards after a delay caused by repairs. Already late we headed south to catch the ferry on Routa 7 down to Patagonia. After 10min on the ferry we noticed a massive, almost nuclear looking cloud boiling upwards just were we left a few hours ago. Frenetically looking for a good outlook we then rushed to the only non-forested place to get a decent view of the show. We quickly put every bit of camera-equipment we could find on the constantly growing mushroom-cloud. We shot timelapses in 8K and 4K with a Pentax 645Z and Canon 6D. On the A7s we shot 4K video to the Shogun. We filled almost all of our memory cards in the prior night so I had to do backups while shooting all this stuff.
Now this thing ($599) looks seriously interesting. PetaPixel writes,
Inside the camera is a 1-inch CMOS BSI sensor — the same size used by Nikon 1 mirrorless cameras — and on the front of the camera is a 32mm-equivalent f/1.8 lens with a 6-blade iris. Those specs are crammed into a 2.65-inch (6.9cm) tall camera that weighs just 3.8oz (108g) and fits comfortably in your palm and pocket.
Simply because this would have been the 11-year-old me’s Favorite Thing Ever, I’ll point out the B-Unstoppable flying tank thingamabob. PetaPixel notes,
According to B, a hybrid model can be very useful in certain situations. For example, driving saves up to 60% of energy when compared to flying. In addition, the tank mode is much quieter than flying and can enable pilots to reach previously difficult areas. We also can’t forget that driving a tank-drone hybrid sounds like a ton of fun.
“Google has big plans for VR,” writes The Verge, “but it’s starting with something small: a piece of cardboard. We go behind the scenes with the new Google Cardboard and a crazy GoPro camera rig.”
Google is committed to exploring and preserving the ocean. Today, in time for World Oceans Day on June 8, and in partnership with XL Catlin Seaview Survey, NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries and the Chagos Conservation Trust, you can explore brand new Street View imagery of more than 40 locations around the world, including the American Samoa and Chagos Islands and underwater dives in Bali, the Bahamas and the Great Barrier Reef. We hope the release of this imagery inspires people to learn more about this precious natural resource.
“Oh man, not the hackneyed ‘Let’s tilt the camera & make steep streets look flat’ thing again,” you could be forgiven for saying. But damn if Karen X. Cheng (of “donut selfie” fame) and filmmaker Ross Ching haven’t made something really fresh & fun:
As Lightroom is to Photoshop, Google Photos is to Snapseed:
The former manages thousands of photos & offers a comparatively lightweight editor, while the latter provides maximum power.
Edits in the former are written in place* non-destructively, while images handed off to the latter result in newly generated copies.
On iOS & Android you can use Snapseed to edit any image in Photos by simply opening the image in Photos, tapping the overflow menu (upper right corner), and choosing “Edit in Snapseed.” This means that applying deep editing functionality requires just one additional tap relative to using the lightweight (but deceptively powerful) editor in Photos.
We think this integration works well, but of course there are always ideas on how it could be improved. Now that Photos & Snapseed have been available for a bit, how are you finding the integration? Any particular likes/dislikes/requests?
Thanks, J.
*This currently works on iOS & Web; Photos on Android writes edited pixels as new files.
Even if the soundtrack gets a little Inception Horn-y, this is quite an impressive bit of filmmaking from EarthCam. As Khoi Vinh notes, “[I]t seems like a marvel of meticulous, patient shot-planning; because the sheer mass of its subject changes so dramatically, the camera must pan to accommodate the construction’s progress slowly, over the course of years.”
Wes Anderson meets “The Shining”—brilliant. Steve Ramsden writes, “I noticed how Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick frame their shots in a similar way – this was the result: ‘The Grand Overlook Hotel!’”
To upload quickly, drag and drop images & videos into the browser window. It’s additive, so you can keep dragging in multiple batches & the dialog will respond.
To select a range of photos quickly, select one, then hold Shift while clicking another.
To zoom into an image, click it to open it in the 1up view, then use trackpad scrolling.
To navigate quickly, hold down the right (or left) arrow key in 1up; it flies!
To exit 1up view (returning to the grid), press Esc.
To scroll fast through your whole library, grab/drag the date tooltip (next to the scrollbar).
To jump to the top quickly after scrolling far down the photos grid, click any white space in the app bar (the top area that holds the search bar, etc.).
To find recently uploaded files, go to the search page, then click the “Recently added” tile.
To filter the Collections view, click the “Collections” title, then show just Albums, Movies, or Stories.
Please go, kick the tires, and let us know what other refinements you’d like. (More good stuff is on the way!)
I consider it the best photo backup-and-sync cloud service I’ve tested — better than the leading competitors from Apple, Amazon, Dropbox and Microsoft.
The coolest aspect of the new Google Photos is that once you click the search button — before you even type anything — the app presents you with groups of pictures organized by three categories: People, Places and Things.
The new Google Photos brings the company’s expertise in artificial intelligence, data mining and machine learning to bear on the task of storing, organizing and finding your photos. And that, combined with its cross-platform approach, makes it the best of breed.
I really enjoyed The Verge’s hands-on discussion of Google Photos, including interviews with my teammates Anil & Dave in which they answer frank questions about privacy & trust. It’s a great six-minute overview.
Shoot five or more frames in quick succession, and Photos will analyze their content & try to make a stabilized, looping animation. You can also select any range of frames in the Android or iOS app, then tap the “+” icon and choose “Animation.”
To share it on Facebook, right-click the image itself, copy the URL, and paste it into Facebook. (I’ll keep pestering my friend there to make things a bit simpler still. :-))
Oh, and if you want to see all your animations & other creations (collages, etc.), visit the search page and tap “Creations” down at the bottom.
My teammate & fellow Photoshop veteran Aravind Krishnaswamy has shared a few notes on his setup:
Most of my photos are in Lightroom but I also take the occasional picture with a phone and I like having a unified view of everything. I also like stuff like search & explore and the creations made from both my LR photos as well as my mobile ones. I don’t really have an interest in doing major editing on a phone and having sync back to Lightroom or anything like that, I just really like the idea of having access to all my photos on my phone as long as I have an internet connection.
For this I use Jeffrey Friedl’s Folder Publisher to auto publish to a Drive folder which then syncs to Photos. The folder names get indexed in search and come up in auto complete. And if for some reason I want the folder structure they are still Drive (haven’t wanted it in the few months I’ve been doing this). The only downside is that it requires storage on Drive: my 100k photos take up about 460GB. But I shoot with high megapixel bodies (36, 80) and the plugin is configured to export full size, high quality JPG. If I resized them to something more sane, that number would be smaller.
Note that that amount of storage would cost you a princely ten bucks a month & still leave you with more than half your Drive space free.
Update: A couple of readers have asked why Aravind exports from LR instead of just uploading the raw originals. You can certainly do the latter (as I do), but only Lightroom & Camera Raw can interpret the edits that LR applies & stores as XMP metadata. (Google Photos & other raw rendering engines just ignore one another’s parameters.) If you want to see the results of those edits, you need to render out JPEGs.
It gives you free unlimited storage for what Google calls “high-quality” photos and videos. At the free tier, the service compresses images, maintaining resolution up to 16 megapixels. Google claims these maintain near-identical visual quality.
It’s true: check out these comparisons. Honestly, if we never said anything about compression, I don’t think a single human (myself included) would ever notice, but it’s important to be transparent so that people can make informed choices.
Mat continues:
Videos are maintained at 1080p. If you want to keep your original photos, Google offers 15 GB of storage for free and an additional terabyte for $10 per month. [Also, 100GB = $2/mo.] To keep your photos current, Google Photos has automatic backups for iOS, Android, and the desktop. You don’t have to actually do anything to make them happen.
If you shoot raw images with a DSLR (as I do), you can choose “Original” from the desktop app and “High Quality” from your phone so that your phone pics don’t count against quota. (Every iPhone image besides panos will fit comfortably under the 16 megapixel cap.)
Bradley Horowitz led Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr & now runs our group. He had a really interesting conversation with Steven Levy, and I’ve pulled out some of my favorite bits here.
On what problems Google Photos addresses:
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. It will happen for you transparently, in the background. I don’t think there’s another company on earth that can make that claim.
You almost need a second vacation to go through the pictures of the safari on your first vacation. That’s the problem we’re trying to fix — to automate the process so that users can be in the moment.
On why it was important to separate Google Photos from Google+:
We heard from our Google Plus photo users that we had great technology, but they didn’t want their life’s archive brought into a social product, any social product. It’s more akin to Gmail — there’s no button on Gmail that says “publish on the Internet.” “Broadcast” and “archive” are really different.
I’m really happy about this separation. It’s something I oh-so-gingerly suggested during my interview back in 2013, and happily it was already under consideration. Separating things thoughtfully took time & care.
On search & computer vision:
The key to getting that last percentage [of accuracy] which tips it over will come now, when we deploy it at scale. Getting all that data will create a virtuous cycle of getting better and better. […]
We also want to bring all of the power of computer vision and machine learning to improve those photos, create derivative works, to make suggestions…to really be your assistant.
This last bit has been my jam: If you Tron-ified the best Photoshop artists, animators, and illustrators in the world, kept them in your pocket, and had them just try to please you by creating amazing things from your photos & videos, what would you have them create, and from what? We’re already doing a lot in that regard (making movies, stories, collages, etc.) and have a lot more ideas, but we’d of course love to hear yours.
Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” A huge amount of that information is photographic (a trillion+ photos per year), and a huge amount of that is private.
Today Google Photos brings amazing search power to your pocket, letting you back up a lifetime of photos & videos—for free*—and have a virtual assistant organize them, then create amazing movies, stories, animations, and more. Check it out now on iOS, Android, and Web.
The search stuff is amazing. As my teammate Vincent Mo writes, “Can’t remember the name of that beer you had while on vacation? Search for ‘beer in Los Angeles.’ Ya, it actually works.” (I just tried it & dang, he’s right!)
My part of the team has been working hard on an ultra-streamlined yet powerful image editor, and I’ll post more details about that (and about how it relates to Snapseed) soon. I’ve also been responsible for the Movies feature that automatically creates movies from your moments (or lets you make them on the fly), plus collages, animations, and more (we’re just getting warmed up). From the team blog post:
The app can also help you quickly enhance photos and combine them in new ways to help you relive your life’s moments. In one tap, get instant adjustments tuned to the photo’s color, lighting, and subject to make each photo look its best. Press the “+” button to create your own collages, animations, movies with soundtracks, and more.
If you swipe to the left, you’ll open the Assistant view, where we’ll suggest new things made with your photos and videos, such as a collage or a story based on a recent trip you took. After previewing the creation, you can choose to keep, edit, or discard it.
As I say, I’ll share more details soon. In the meantime, we’d love to know what you think! If you have questions, ask ‘em here or check out the new help community.
Happy shooting, J.
*Seriously? Yes, seriously. We maintain the original resolution up to 16MP for photos, and 1080p high-definition for videos. If you want to store really high-res stuff, uncompressed raw images, etc., you still get an additional 15GB of free storage, and after that storage is super cheap (two bucks a month for 100GB, ten for 1000).
iOS should be available soon; Android is available now. My teammate Sven Tiffe writes,
After releasing Snapseed 2, we’ve heard a lot of excited voices, but also listened to your constructive feedback. You told us and we heard you, Grunge is back!
We’ve started rolling out the Android update today, and the iOS update will follow shortly. This update includes:
The return of the Grunge filter
The ability to copy, paste and hide Control Points in Selective
Improved styles in HDR
An option to export flat copies on iOS 8 for compatibility with apps like Lightroom & Dropbox
And of course, stability and performance improvements. We’re continuously working on improving Snapseed and you can expect more in the future, so stay tuned!
It’s a bit heavy on Ye Olde Scary Music & camera moves, but this piece captures some eerie, occasionally beautiful looks into modern ruins:
Project Senium is an effort to preserve the experience of some of the most beautifully disturbing places in the world in a cinematic short film. By bringing tools and experience from the realm of filmmaking, we show the decaying walls of abandoned mental hospitals, expose their dark history, and preserve forever the beauty that few get to witness.
Here’s a three-minute tour of why beautification features are a touchy subject—desired & disturbing at the same time.
A few sample quotes:
“I feel really gross hitting this checkmark because it’s like I’m validating everything I’ve just done.”
“It automatically gets rid of all these freckles like it’s something that’s a bad thing.”
“I was more affected by it than I thought I would be.”
“If you start seeing your friends doing something like this, and you don’t know that they’re doing it, then you start to think that real people look like this.”
“You would be disappointed that you’re not a Photoshop.”
Of course there was an entire South Park episode on just this subject—biting & hilarious. Too bad it’s apparently not online at the moment.
[Update: FWIW on the list of top 50 free apps in Korea, 5 are for beautification. The list in China features three. The list in the US features zero. —Via Eunyoung Kim]
