You Should Take More Photos
Machine learning techniques will be able to extract a wealth of information from our photos and use it to organize and present the photo collection in ways that make sense to us. Because storage and computer power become ever cheaper, companies can do this for millions of users with billions of photos. The only thing we humans need to do is to provide the photos and enjoy.
Most people are probably used to face recognition, which has already been widely available for decades. Especially from Facebook, which will highlight faces for easy tagging, or even tag people in photos on its own. The fact that machines are able to do this blazingly fast is old news, but the machines are so good at it now, that they even make fewer mistakes than the typical human.
The advancements do not stop with faces. In the last few years we have seen huge improvements in the ImageNet Classification challenge, concerning the task of labelling images based on their contents: Does the image contain e.g. animals, food, cars, snow, etc. The record for lowest error rate for this kind of classification has been dropping rapidly lately, especially in the last year as large tech companies Baidu, Google, and Microsoft have strived to outdo one another.
We have even seen examples of systems that can describe images with natural english sentences just like a human would. Just think about what this can be used for. I am already imagining that it can be combined with things like face recognition to find the exact photo I'm referring to when I search for “Nanna and Oscar assembling a chair from Ikea on the patio last fall.”
Yesterday Google introduced the new Google Photos service which actually it’s mostly just a rebranding of the already awesome Google+ Photos. They now allow anyone to upload unlimited high quality photos and videos. I have already had my phone upload every single photo I took to Google for years. In turn Google do awesome things with them.
First I know that all my photos are safe and always accessible from any device. I know that the app will automatically upload every photo I take on my phone as quickly as it can and scrolling back to emails that are more than 9 years old in my Gmail I have greater confidence in Google’s ability to store my data than my own. The app is delightful to use: When I scroll through my photos in the app, they all just appear instantly, just as if they were actually on my phone — even though most of them are not.
Second Google indexes my photos in meaningful ways: When I search for “snow” I get photos with snow. When I search for “France” I get photos from the vacation in France. Locations are of course “easy” to extract from the photos’ geodata, but I never told Google which of my photos contain food, or dogs, or snow. They are using machine learning to do this, and even though my search for “snow” does return a few photos without any snow, it’s still a very powerful and useful feature.
Third for a long time I have enjoyed Google’s ability to organize and present my photos in ways that are meaningful to me. I may take a lot of photos during an event, and the next day Google presents me with a story, that has been put together based on the best photos and where/when they were taken. The generated stories are not perfect, but they are usually good enough as drafts that it only takes a few minutes of tweaking to actually make it into something that is a delight to look at. See how nice it can be.
I hope and think that this is only the beginning. When I have a decent camera with me in my pocket all the time, I take more pictures of all the things I see and do every day. Services like Google Photos or Dropbox’s Carousel app to makes sense of this stream of photos for me and continue to present it for me in meaningful ways. Sharing my photos with friends and family only takes a few tabs on my phone when they are already in the cloud, and adding photos that others have shared with me to my own collection is even easier.
I don’t spend a lot of time trying to take great pictures. When I think that something is interesting enough I just pull my phone out of my pocket and take a few quick snaps. I do this a lot and many of the pictures are really crappy, but some of them are good. I know that if I just take enough photos there will be some great ones in between, and I trust that Google will be able to pick out the highlights for me. (This was actually a feature of Google+ photos that I hope to see return soon in the new version)
On new years day this year I spent more than an hour flicking through my photos from last year, and it was great way to be reminded of some of the things, that I had already forgotten all about. Once a week Carousel shows me flashbacks with photos in my collection from the same week on previous years. Those flashbacks reminds me of places I visited, parties, people I met.
I want more like that and I think that it’s coming. That is why I always try to take more photos, and why I think You should do the same.
