A Fortnight With
Google Photos launched at the I/O keynote this year, and although I wasn’t immediately convinced, I did start uploading my photo collection. It’s not an entirely new product- in many ways it’s a rebranding of the photos section of Google Plus- but it’s been made more attractive by being removed from the social network. As Bradley Horowitz said in an interview with Steven Levy,
It’s more akin to Gmail — there’s no button on Gmail that says “publish on the Internet.” “Broadcast” and “archive” are really different and so part of Google photos is to create a safe space for your photos and remove any stigma associated with saving everything.
Here are some thoughts after a couple of weeks.
The good
All my photos, everywhere
It took a while, because I have something like a terabyte of photos going back over twelve years, but now I’ve uploaded them all, I can access them on every device. I know there are other services that promise to do that, but Google’s was free even for such a large library (at the cost of resizing some of the images down and converting RAW to JPG). Unlike Apple Photos, the library is available via native apps on Android devices as well as iOS ones, and perhaps unsurprisingly the web version works well too.
Use of Time
The one piece of reasonably reliable metadata attached to a digital photo is the time it was taken. (I say “reasonably” because digital cameras can be bad at dealing with timezones, but at least you usually get the right day.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, the app uses this as its primary method of organisation and navigation, but its use of a custom scroll element showing the month and year means that, as long as you have a good idea when something happened, you can find it quickly.
This is one area where the native apps stand out over the web app- there’s a choice of level of detail which makes it easy to zoom.
Creations
Thankfully renamed from the previous “Auto Awesome” label the feature sported as part of Google+, Photos can generate animations, panoramas, collages, videos, and even stories (“not a photo album, not a collage… kind of a narrative biography”) from the uploaded photos. I’ve been impressed by the way my older photos have been collected into geographically labelled stories, despite a complete lack of geographic information (how quickly we’ve become accustomed to that metadata in the photos taken with our phones!), and some of the animations have been wonderful. It helps that, while many people would have kept only the best shot, I’ve refused to delete images, so where I have different choices of a shot, they’ve become good source material. (Burst mode photos are even better.)
It’s also pretty amazing to see twelve year old photos turned into a wonderful panorama with no joins or striping, looking better than a desktop computer of the time could manage. Admittedly, the camera I was using had a Stitch Assist mode, but it’s still good to see.
Facial Recognition
The approach to grouping faces has an interesting design choice- no labels are applied. You can see all the faces that the app has recognised, and then see all the photos of that face, but you can’t apply a label, and there’s no suggestion of who the person is.
The contrast with both Facebook and Apple Photos is clear and somewhat surprising. No doubt Apple would protest that their face matching database is local to your devices, but I find the fact that Google isn’t making a point of naming people, instead merely grouping them, both interesting and something of a relief.
Image Recognition
Unlike Flickr, where the (relatively few) photos I’ve chosen to upload also got tagged by me, Google has to rely on just the image data to provide some context. As well as geography and faces, there are groupings of similar images based on elements- some of the top ones for me are skyscrapers, sky, skylines, trains, posters, cars, towers, and buses. Unlike Flickr’s new auto tags, they’re not exposed publicly (which, given how weird (and offensively bad) image recognition can be, is a good thing).
The Bad
Search as interface
Google often lean heavily on search as the universal interface. For the first few days with the app, I kept forgetting that the Faces, Places, and Creations menus were hidden in the Search section (they’re displayed before you enter a search term). Perhaps this is an artefact of Material Design, but in any case, I found it a bit disorientating, and I still think it’s an odd decision.
Oddly, search is also underpowered: I can’t do an intersection of place and feature, or place and face.
Use of Geography
It seems odd to me that the company that launched Maps makes so little use of them- you can see where a particular photo was taken but not where photos near it were, nor can you narrow photos by zooming in. Maps are used in stories, but only in a very broad-brush way- there’s so much more that could be done.
The choices of place are also sometimes baffling. Why are San Francisco and New York treated as single places, but the City of London, Kensington, and Greenwich all treated as distinct?
Finally, the list of photos inside a place also loses the nice time-displaying scrolling element. I suspect I understand the technological limitations here; if it’s anything like the systems offered in their cloud services, Google’s back end storage is better at providing pages of results than the complete count of them. Nonetheless, it’s annoying if you’re trying to filter by both place and time.
Variations in functionality
I mentioned before that the zoom UI on mobile is nice, but that it doesn’t work on the web. Sadly, that’s true for other things, too. You can only create a story from a mobile app, not the web (although you can add to and edit a story, even a automatically created one, from either); the same’s true of animations and collages. ((I’m told that edit behaviour also varies- it makes copies on apps, but web edits are non-destructive.)
Speaking of collages, I almost never want photos included in one automatically. Unfortunately, you can’t disable one particular type of creation- only the entire feature.
Meanwhile, the choices of the software can be baffling. Why are so many photos that could be turned into panoramas instead made into animations? Why do I have five day-long stories for a trip rather than a single five-day long story? Why do animations so often contain a frame or two (out of five or ten) that jar, and which would be better removed?
Videos are probably the most odd. Ryan Gantz wrote about a generated video conflating a child’s play and a funeral, and while I don’t have anything that tone-deaf, the chirpy jangly indie music accompanying my usual videos out of train windows combined with a random picture from the same day are, frankly, a bit weird. Still, at least they’re sort of amusing.
Image Recognition
I mentioned above that Photos thinks one of my top subjects is “cars”. This was a surprise to me, and looking at the photos, I see instead trains, vans, buses, signs, posters, carriages, lorries, walls, toys, hoardings, and staircases, just to pick from the first few pages. Admittedly, some of these do have cars in the background, but it still feels confusingly overzealous.
It also thinks photos from bus windows are concerts, masts and radio telescopes are ferris wheels, and that roads and railway lines are race tracks. Still, as I said above, at least these mis-categorisations aren’t exposed to the public.
Overall
Despite the fact I listed more gripes than praise, I think I’m actually quite taken with Google Photos. It’s a good attempt to deal with a real problem- the vast quantities of digital photography that so many of us now have- and it’s also been a great way for me to see what’s changed, and what hasn’t, over the last decade of my life, both in where I was and in what I photograph.
It’s also refreshed my intention to categorise and publish some of the photos I’ve never shared, as well as prompting me to start carrying around my “real” camera, as well as my phone, and to try and take more photos every day. That feels like a success all of its own.
