

Google Photos - joebeetee
https://photos.google.com/

======
magic5227
If only one of these online services could import all meta-data from iPhoto or
similar apps.

Moving to most of the current cloud services requires basically ditching years
of organizing and meta-data work. So for people like me it becomes just
backup.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I've given up on all of that. All my pictures are on
/disk/camera/{year}/{year}{month}{day}-{eventName}/IMG_1294.jpg

I've thought about cramming metadata in there, somehow - text files on the
disk? Metadata in the file itself? - but nothing ever seemed right, and like
hell will I let some other application move/copy my files over and maintain
its own weird binary database that I'm likely to never be able to read again
as soon as my license expires or if I switch operating systems.

------
danso
Nice rundown from Mat Honan at Buzzfeed:

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/googles-new-photos-app-
is-l...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/googles-new-photos-app-is-like-
gmail-for-pictures#.ofXNOoEv)

> _I have a cousin who I only have a few photos of. In almost all of these,
> mostly taken last year, she is 30. In another, from 2000, she is 16. But
> it’s the earliest one in the cluster that’s remarkable. In that picture, my
> cousin is only 4. Google Photos successfully matched a 4-year-old child’s
> face to a grown woman’s, with only a lone photo at 16 to tie them together._

> _Places are also useful. Photos looks at a variety of signals for this,
> including geodata from photos. But thanks to the wealth of geographic image
> data Google has amassed, it can also put your old, untagged photos on a map
> based on landmarks that appear in them. It reliably placed many pictures I
> had taken in Singapore more than a dozen years ago into a cluster, for
> example._

> _This makes Photos very searchable. It’s easy to find places in your
> pictures — even ones that aren’t geotagged. It’s equally easy to find very
> specific things, like Labrador retrievers, poodles, and caves. Photos also
> allows you to search for pictures of people doing things. I found people in
> poses when I searched for “yoga,” pictures of people with booze, coffee, and
> Coca-Cola when I searched for “drinking.” Sometimes the results are odd:
> photos of both wide smiles and crying faces when I searched for “laughing.”_

Finally, the amazing deep learning imagery algorithms Google and Stanford
demonstrated last year [1, 2] are available for consumer benefit. But yes, it
really does seem like "Gmail for Photos", in that so much more of your life is
now knowable by Google.

edit: further reflection...I have probably a TB worth of images of me and my
friends over the past five years. I've done a decent job of labeling the
folders every time I move files off of my camera and into Lightroom...but the
thought of going through all the folders and sorting and tagging them seemed
like something I would wait to do in my old age when it's time to make
sentimental scrapbooks...Google Photo seems like something that could
revolutionize that chore of finding photos of remembrance (for a wedding,
funeral, graduation, etc)...on the other hand, it will most definitely have
the power to connect everyone to photos taken by their friends, simply through
the networks inferred from GMail/G+/etc...I think for the sake of my friends'
past assumptions of privacy, I'm going to sit out on using Google Photos for
my old photos...but I imagine in the future, we'll be less surprised about how
we were auto-tagged in someone else's camera phone.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.4555.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.4555.pdf)

[2]
[http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/deepimagesent/)

~~~
pavel_lishin
To take the paranoid view, Google will know where you've been at any point
during basically your entire photographed life.

