Google Photos A brand new product. Not to be confused with Picasa or Google+ Photos, those were totally different, guys. The logo is a pinwheel not an aperture [image: agwawweg.png] All jokes aside, Google Photos is a rather creepy extension on Google’s previous photo apps. In an exaggerated recount of the hundreds of pictures taken of his daughter’s kindergarten graduation, Anil Sabharwal points out a legitimately large flaw in our culture of documenting everything: organization. With thousands of pictures, we struggle to find that specific on from that one time 3 years ago. What to show someone the essence of your trip to the moon last weekend? Good luck finding a good representation! Sharing that album of all the mediocre food you’ve had in the last year is tricky when your friends are on instagram and you’re still on flickr. Google Photos addresses these shortcomings with 3 stated goals: To be a Home for all your photos & videos To automatic organize your photos Be easy to share and save (i.e. cross platform) Home In order to be a home for your media, Google is offering unlimited storage of High Quality photos and videos.* It’s not hard to see the implications of that much free† storage. * up to 16 megapixel pictures, 1080p video † “free” Organization Of course, just having storage is no better than our current solutions, but that’s where automatic organization comes in. Of course, starting out obviously, Google Photos can give you a timeline of your photos. By default, it will show highlights for individual days, however with standard zooming gestures, you can view by months or years. [image: z3JGOGs.png?1] [image: e7uL0Fh.png?1] [image: ENufyye.png?1] Where Google Photos truly shines (and becomes creepy) is in it’s more data-oriented aggregation: your photos will automatically be organized by people, places, and things: [image: HHqQ5WG.png?1] Google uses is image analysis expertise to make categories of your personal photos with, from what I’ve seen, surprisingly accurate results. Not only will it find all pictures of the same person, the thumbnail for it will be the best headshot of that person. People can even be recognized over time - all the way back to their baby pictures (that’s some crazy recognition). Is there a car in the background of your photo? You better believe that’ll show up if you search your pictures for “cars.” Snow? Yup. All knowing Google, mirite? Sure would make it easy to keep track of your nudes ;) Sharing In order to make sharing hassle free, you generate a link for an arbitrary collection of your photos and send it to your friend. Your friend can then view these photos on the internet without having to have any apps or be logged in to any services. If your friend is also on Google Photos, they will have a one button import, making it simple to send and receive photos for permanent storage. Sure would make it easy to leak your nudes ;) Editorial There’s no doubt that Google Photos is impressive and probably quite useful, but it brings up a privacy question - what is google doing with my photos? Obviously, they’re going to use it to improve train their image AI. But is that it? The audiences nervous, half-hearted clapping indicated that people are a little skeptical of this new service. But is it really that different? We already give Google a shocking amount of personal data. The visibly personal aspects of photos make it much more obviously invasive, but is it really significantly different information than before? I think it could be argued either way. Whether you buy into Google’s vision for you photos or not, you have to admit that their AI is really good.