Photo organization apps have become a lot more sophisticated over the years. But let's be honest: do you actually edit geolocation pins, train face detection software to correctly identify your friends, and curate the best shots from your recent tropical getaway?
Google, which already might know more about us than we know about ourselves, bets you don't. So today it unveiled a new feature in Google Photos that automates a lot of the album organization tasks you wish you had time to do.
The automation tools are aimed at people who've just returned from vacation. Once you've uploaded your snapshots, Google Photos will suggest a new album, curated with what it thinks are your best images. It then adds maps and drops location pins to show how far you traveled. Finally, you can add text captions to complete the album, and then share it with your sunburned family and friends.
Of course, many of these features aren't exactly new. iPhoto introduced geolocation and face detection years ago. Picasa, the Google Photos predecessor that will soon be shut down, includes an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button to automatically retouch photos.
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But as Wired points out, Google has put a lot of thought into automating its new organization tools. Its secret weapon is machine learning, which comes in handy for improving the accuracy of location pins. In addition to reading the camera's location information, Google Photos can rely on its database of landmarks to match your photos to the exact spot you stood when you snapped the shutter button.
"We have 255,000 landmarks that we automatically recognize," a Google engineer told Wired. "It's a combination of both computer vision and geotags. Even without the geotags, we'd be able to recognize a landmark."
As for detecting faces, Google can recognize if a person is important to you based on the how often they appear in your photos. That feature is private and won't try to search social media profiles for the people you take pictures of, according to Wired.
The new features rolled out today to all users on Android, iOS, and web versions of Google Photos.