

How Google’s New Photos App Can Tell Cats From Dogs - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-google-s-new-photos-app-can-tell-cats-from-dogs-ffd651dfcd80

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pbw
The photo labeling feature is a dancing bear. Yes it's impressive it dances at
all, but it's quite bad it it. I have tons of kids soccer pictures they were
labeled Football, Rugby Football, Baseball and Golf. Worse though it doesn't
have any duplication detection or it's severely broken. I have a lot of near-
duplicates because I use Picasa and I have both it's inputs and output
(cropped, etc).

So nearly ever "auto created" college it suggests contains all duplicate
photos. It even created an animation cycling through duplicate photos (with
slightly different lighting). It's a great start but I think it's 5 years from
being "good".

~~~
EugeneOZ
Maybe the most pity rant "soccer vs football" I ever read. If it's the only
issue you have, then service if 100% fine.

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nevi-me
A number of people have said that Photos has grouped their photos by people,
with Google saying that the feature can recognise faces over time ... I don't
have that, and I want to try it. Anyone know a way of forcing it to show me
People? I only have Places and Things.

I like what Google's done! I can search for 'baby' and get all the photos with
babies (few false positives here and there). Hopefully in the near future
they'll add feedback options so we can point out errors in classification.

~~~
jordanthoms
They mention in the fine print somewhere that the People grouping is only
available in certain countries, presumably due to legal issues.

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s3r3nity
My problem with the hype around this auto-tagging is that Microsoft had this
in OneDrive months ago:

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/2876548/microsoft-onedrive-
ad...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2876548/microsoft-onedrive-adds-super-
intelligent-searching-of-document-text.html)

~~~
jordanthoms
Google Photos (as Google+ photos) has had auto tagging for several years, it
was announced back in October 2013 -
[http://googleblog.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/google-hangouts-
and...](http://googleblog.blogspot.co.nz/2013/10/google-hangouts-and-photos-
save-some.html)

~~~
Sarkie
2008?

[http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/02/picasa-refresh-brings-
facia...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/02/picasa-refresh-brings-facial-
recognition/)

2009 even better?

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/picasa-adds-facial-
recognit...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/picasa-adds-facial-recognition-
and-geo-tagging-to-its-desktop-app/)

------
organsnyder
I've found Google Photos to be fairly bad at this, actually. Here's a few
results from searching my photos for "dog":

[https://goo.gl/photos/pDwHPzcG3w541ubV6](https://goo.gl/photos/pDwHPzcG3w541ubV6)

~~~
magicalist
Mine is surprisingly amazing at picking out partial dog parts. What's weird is
that the interface (as far as I can tell) has no button for "no this is not a
dog". Same thing for face clustering, where I have like two (or more) clusters
of certain people.

~~~
agumonkey
It's random enough, a blurry cat, head down, in the night can be tagged
properly, while a nice walking cat in normal daylight conditions but behind
open window blind won't be flagged. Not that surprising though.

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fweespeech
As others have said it is kind of meh.

However, what really bothers me is the fact it tried to 'opt me in' to backing
up my photos [again] to Google, despite the fact I had the option turned off
already. Additionally, many of the prompts [even with it turned off!] imply
some level of syncing/communication with Google.

And the fact I regularly find the Google+ app "re-enabled" mysteriously when
I've had it disabled for months.

Can Google stop "resetting" my privacy settings and hoping I don't notice yet
with these updates?

It really is starting to irritate me to the point where I'm thinking of
dumping Google products altogether, honestly.

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x5n1
yes give google all your photos so their ai can analyze them.

