The logo of the multi-facetted internet giant Google is seen projected onto the palm of a hand. (Photo : Getty Images/Jeff J Mitchell)
Google Photos app can now choose the best photos for the user's photo album automatically. It has new tools to make organizing photos easier.
Google posted on its official blog last March 22, Tuesday a new feature in Google Photos. This new feature automates a lot of the tasks for the album organization most users wanted to do with their time.
The new automation tools target people who have just come from their vacation. When the photos are uploaded, Google Photos will suggest the user to create a new album with photos it thinks are the best to add.
Furthermore, the app adds maps and also puts location pins to show how far the user has traveled on vacation. The user can also add captions in text and share it to family and friends.
Google has put a lot of effort and thought into making its new organization tools automatic, Wired reported. The publication revealed that the secret of the app is its machine learning which is important for improving the accuracy of the location pins. The app can rely on its database of landmarks to match the user's photos.
Google Photos product manager Francois de Halleux said in an interview with Wired that they can detect 255,000 landmarks that they can automatically recognize. He added that it is a combination of both computer vision and geotags and even without the geotags, they can still recognize the landmark.
A landmark would be recognized by Google's system and then double-checked against a location or the geotagging of the photo. There are some cases that the system will identify the real one versus a replica.
David Lieb, Google Photos product lead, made a photo of the Eiffel Tower an example. The system would know that the user is in Paris or in Las Vegas.
Other people think the new feature is "creepy" but Google said that their machine learning stops short of assigning real-world identities to those faces. Users have the option to tag a person as a family member like "Mom" but these are private tags for sorting within the users own photo roll.
The app will also recognize a person who is important to the user based on how many times their faces appear in the pictures. Lieb said it is a way to get all the benefit of face-grouping without any of the creepiness.
Watch the introduction of the Google photos app video below:
