Google+ New Photo Features Hands-On: Fun, But Unreliable
Amongst the slurry of updates Google announced yesterday at I/O
Auto-Backup
Auto-backup is an option you can enable on your phone so every photo you take will be instantly backed up to Google+ (set to private). It's a seamless, hassle-free backup solution. If it sounds like Google+'s old Instant Upload, that's because that's exactly what it is, it's just been renamed. The new name actually makes more sense for what it does, though.
Highlights
The concept of Highlights is pretty simple. Google+ analyzes your uploaded photos, and tries to pick the best shots out of a given album, and it gives those shots a more prominent focus (it highlights them... get it!?). You can expand to see all of your photos with a single click, but Highlights attempts to hide photos that are blurry, under/over exposed, or duplicates, and tries feature people and landmarks. It actually works fairly well. Most of my out-of-focus shots are swept into the background, and it generally pulls the better photos out. It doesn't get it right every time, but it's consistant enough for us to call this one a hit. It's got a nice layout, too (see top image).
Auto-Enhance
Set to on by default, Auto-Enhance is supposed to automatically take your shitty photos and de-shitify them. It'll correct for over or under exposed shots, vignetting, redeye, wrinkles, and other things. On stage it showed dramatic improvements. In real life? Eh, not so much.
In most instances, the difference Auto-Enhance makes is very subtle. Sometimes you can't even spot it. More often than not, it is a bit of an improvement—adding a little sharpening, subtly adjusting the contrast, etc—it's just not going to blow your mind (at least in our experimentation). I guess ultimately it's good that it doesn't do too much tweaking to your photos, but we were kind of hoping to see the dramatic night/day improvements we saw in the demo. I'd ultimately probably leave auto-enhance on, since I'm typically shooting with a cell phone that may not have the bestest camera, but if you have a good camera, ditch it. Either way, it's easy enough to undo the enhancements if you want to.
Auto-Awesome
First off, good name, guys. Auto-Awesome was the set of features we were most interested in. It basically analyses a series of photos, and does cool things to them, without you having to ask it to. This includes turning a burst of photos into an animated GIF, or a collage. It can connect separate photos into a panorama (assuming they line up), and it can meld three photos shot at different exposures into a single HDR image. It all sounds great, but it's very inconsistent.
The animated GIF feature was generally the most successful. You take a series of shots with the same framing, let Auto Backup do its thing, and then five minutes or so later, the GIF pops up next to the other images. It didn't work every time, but it produced pretty satisfying results.
It took FIVE attempts before the panorama feature finally worked. All other tries just sat there, separate and dejected. When it finally worked, though, it actually looked really great. The above image was three vertical shots. Auto-Awesome did a great job of blending lines and exposure. However, one out of five times is not good enough.
The collage also only worked once and only included three out of the seven photos that were snapped. The other times, it just didn't make a collage, for whatever reason, even when it made a GIF.
The last feature is HDR, and it never worked. We tried seven times, with different phones (and even with the Canon 5D Mark III). Each time we had the exact same framing across all three shots and very different exposure levels. Nothing doing. All of the auto-awesome shots failed at least a couple times, but this was the worst.
So, while Auto-Awesome is cool, it's only cool when it works, and it doesn't work often enough. As of now, it's not something you'd want to rely on. We know everything is supposed to be "auto," but since that clearly isn't working yet it'd be nice to be able to select the five photos you want turned into a GIF, or a collage, or an HDR. Auto when it works, manual-override when it doesn't. Seems like a pretty easy solution.
Conclusion
So the final verdict on the new photo features is that they're decent and/or fun additions, but until they become something you can count on working, their appeal is severely limited. The seamless backup is the only truly killer feature (and it is), but it isn't new. Hopefully, the Auto-Awesome stuff will get better with time, because they really could be fantastic features. And if there's anything that the internet needs right now, it's more animated GIFs.
Google+ New Photo Features Hands-On: Fun, But Unreliable
Amongst the slurry of updates Google announced yesterday at I/O
Auto-Backup
Auto-backup is an option you can enable on your phone so every photo you take will be instantly backed up to Google+ (set to private). It's a seamless, hassle-free backup solution. If it sounds like Google+'s old Instant Upload, that's because that's exactly what it is, it's just been renamed. The new name actually makes more sense for what it does, though.
Highlights
The concept of Highlights is pretty simple. Google+ analyzes your uploaded photos, and tries to pick the best shots out of a given album, and it gives those shots a more prominent focus (it highlights them... get it!?). You can expand to see all of your photos with a single click, but Highlights attempts to hide photos that are blurry, under/over exposed, or duplicates, and tries feature people and landmarks. It actually works fairly well. Most of my out-of-focus shots are swept into the background, and it generally pulls the better photos out. It doesn't get it right every time, but it's consistant enough for us to call this one a hit. It's got a nice layout, too (see top image).
Auto-Enhance
Set to on by default, Auto-Enhance is supposed to automatically take your shitty photos and de-shitify them. It'll correct for over or under exposed shots, vignetting, redeye, wrinkles, and other things. On stage it showed dramatic improvements. In real life? Eh, not so much.
In most instances, the difference Auto-Enhance makes is very subtle. Sometimes you can't even spot it. More often than not, it is a bit of an improvement—adding a little sharpening, subtly adjusting the contrast, etc—it's just not going to blow your mind (at least in our experimentation). I guess ultimately it's good that it doesn't do too much tweaking to your photos, but we were kind of hoping to see the dramatic night/day improvements we saw in the demo. I'd ultimately probably leave auto-enhance on, since I'm typically shooting with a cell phone that may not have the bestest camera, but if you have a good camera, ditch it. Either way, it's easy enough to undo the enhancements if you want to.
Auto-Awesome
First off, good name, guys. Auto-Awesome was the set of features we were most interested in. It basically analyses a series of photos, and does cool things to them, without you having to ask it to. This includes turning a burst of photos into an animated GIF, or a collage. It can connect separate photos into a panorama (assuming they line up), and it can meld three photos shot at different exposures into a single HDR image. It all sounds great, but it's very inconsistent.
The animated GIF feature was generally the most successful. You take a series of shots with the same framing, let Auto Backup do its thing, and then five minutes or so later, the GIF pops up next to the other images. It didn't work every time, but it produced pretty satisfying results.
It took FIVE attempts before the panorama feature finally worked. All other tries just sat there, separate and dejected. When it finally worked, though, it actually looked really great. The above image was three vertical shots. Auto-Awesome did a great job of blending lines and exposure. However, one out of five times is not good enough.
The collage also only worked once and only included three out of the seven photos that were snapped. The other times, it just didn't make a collage, for whatever reason, even when it made a GIF.
The last feature is HDR, and it never worked. We tried seven times, with different phones (and even with the Canon 5D Mark III). Each time we had the exact same framing across all three shots and very different exposure levels. Nothing doing. All of the auto-awesome shots failed at least a couple times, but this was the worst.
So, while Auto-Awesome is cool, it's only cool when it works, and it doesn't work often enough. As of now, it's not something you'd want to rely on. We know everything is supposed to be "auto," but since that clearly isn't working yet it'd be nice to be able to select the five photos you want turned into a GIF, or a collage, or an HDR. Auto when it works, manual-override when it doesn't. Seems like a pretty easy solution.
Conclusion
So the final verdict on the new photo features is that they're decent and/or fun additions, but until they become something you can count on working, their appeal is severely limited. The seamless backup is the only truly killer feature (and it is), but it isn't new. Hopefully, the Auto-Awesome stuff will get better with time, because they really could be fantastic features. And if there's anything that the internet needs right now, it's more animated GIFs.
Google+ Gets Amazing Photo Selection and Auto-Enhancement Features
Google+ is getting some mind-blowing new features to make your images awesome and help you manage your incredibly large photo library. Using advanced algorithms, Google+ will now pick your best photos, auto-enhance images, and more.
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Amazon Cloud Drive Photos Syncs Your iPhone’s Camera Roll
iPhone: Apple's Photo Stream, which automatically backs up and syncs your last 1000 photos for up to 30 days, is a boon for iPhone photographers, but Amazon just rolled out an app that tops it with lots of free storage.
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Flayvr Automatically Sorts Your Photos and Videos Into Event Albums
iOS/Android: Flayvr organizes your photos and videos into moving-picture albums on your device that can then be easily shared with friends via the web.
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Dear Apple, Let’s Talk About Photos
We’ve been managing our photos together for almost a decade now. Things were nice and simple at the start and we both knew what to expect from each other—I pulled my photos off my camera on the computer, imported them into iPhoto and arranged them. Life was good.
But then you came and gave me the great iPhone camera and I started taking more photos like that of this lovely cow. Also you give me a wonderful wireless sync facility so I didn’t ever need to plug my phone into my laptop so I didn’t. So then the photos on my phone and the decade of photos in my iPhoto library started to diverge because I didn’t get round to syncing them.
Then you gave me a beautiful iPad which would looked so perfect for curating my iPhoto library. I couldn’t wait to edit and organise photos from the comfort of my sofa except that you didn’t give me any way to save things back to the library. So I couldn’t. So things just kept piling up on my camera roll.
Then I thought you’d heard my pain and figured it out - you gave me “photo streams” which put every photo on every device. Unfortunately the only way to get photos into iPhoto was still through my desktop so the fact they were available on the iPad was academic because I still couldn’t save them to my library. Also when I pulled them off the photostream they still existed in the camera roll. Two copies (three if I edited them) and you also occasionally told me to delete some because I ran out of space.
To be honest, I got a little confused at this point. Have I transferred them into iPhoto? I’m not sure I’ll check the photostream - ack, no, I remember you told me to delete photos off my photostream because there were too many. Hmmm, check the camera roll again. Hang on a minute - where are my videos?! Turns out photostreams don’t stream videos. Man, these things are not cool.
Just so as you know by the way and don’t freak out but, I’d like to sort my photos when I’m sat on the loo. Or in the bus, or anywhere else I want to kill time with my phone. I don’t want to edit them when I’m sat at my desktop - that’s work time. It really pains me that I can’t do that and so my photos just pile up in a big heap while I waste time reading things I don’t care about on Twitter.
Finally, to add insult to injury, when we moved to your lovely little MacBook Air you kyboshed my disk drive. All of a sudden, after 10 years of taking high-res photos and videos I couldn’t even fit them onto my laptop. Not only that but you insist on keeping a cache on my Macbook of my entire decade of photos at just the right size for each iDevice. Did you know that I’m using 7% of my entire Macbook disk drive just caching photos for my iPhone and iPad? That’s crazy! I paid a lot of money to you for that flash drive—I don’t want to waste it on a photo cache.
So Apple, I think you’ve got a bit confused. Don’t worry about sharing, we don’t need you for that. Your job is to take photos, organise them and make sure they don’t get lost. So let’s talk about how you can do that.
What I would like from Apple to manage my photos
1) I want the canonical copy of my iPhoto library in the cloud. One iPhoto library in the cloud, many devices with access to it. I want to edit, organise and delete photos on any device and see the same changes on all other devices. No master/slave setup - just straight cloud access.
2) You can charge me for this. I suggest $5/month. Maybe that’s a bit more than it costs you at the moment but that’s what I’m prepared to pay and we both know that you’ll do very well out of this in the long run. However for that I want unlimited space including for all of my videos. FYI that’s not what really I’m paying you for. I’m really paying you for the peace of mind that you’ve got my memories safe-guarded. I’m technically paying you for insurance. The utility this offers just the carrot that gets me over the hump of paying you.
3) Get rid of photo streams. Make the camera roll a single photo stream that shows up in iPhoto (on all devices). I want a single camera roll that all devices feed into. I want to take photos, queue them in my camera roll then pull them out as I organise and sort them into my library. Let me explain: photos and videos have two phases 1. on the camera roll 2. in my photo library. Nowhere else.
4) I’d like you to create API for my iCloud camera roll so any camera I own could hook into it - I want to be able to buy an SLR with wireless capabilities and simply connect it as a new source to my camera roll.
5) Make iPhoto on the iPad and the iPhone work well. Make them do clever things to give me fast access to my photos from the cloud. You did it for iTunes, let’s bring the magic a second time. Let me harness power of that splendid little device direct from the loo.
This opportunity won’t last forever by the way. Most people haven’t got a good backup strategy and don’t spend any money on backup but by the time they do they won’t be prepared to give you yet more dollar to take care of their photos. When the inevitable time comes that they’re paying Dropbox or Google $10/month for unlimited backup they won’t cough up another $5 for photos. However they’re not doing that now and you’ve got a window to bring some Apple magic.
I know Steve’s not around to crack the whip but you need to get your act together Apple. This could be a nice little $2 billion/year recurring revenue stream but the window will close. If it closes before you’ve been bothered to sort this mess out we’re all rodgered so chop chop!
Photo credits: My iPhone
Peter Nixey is a Rails developer, entrepreneur, and the former CEO of Clickpass. You can follow him on Twitter here. This piece originally appeared on his blog.
How You’re Unknowingly Embarrassing Yourself Online (and How to Stop)
Posted by Lifehacker.com
You probably know not to post things online that could bite you later, but many of us do it all the time anyway—often without even realizing it. Whether it's a friend tagging you in a photo or admitting you torrent your movies in a Facebook status, even innocuous posts or photos can damage your relationships, get you in trouble at work, or even land you in legal hot water. Here's what we mean, and how to stop.
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