Tagging, sorting, foldering, and creating collections of digital photographs is an agony of the first world. As the number of photos keeps increasing — by latest estimate of 800 billion pieces annually — only the bravest souls can keep their digital memories in order using traditional means.

Enter the knight in shining armor: cloud & algorithms. The below pictures are a snapshot of an automatically created photo album about a skiing trip to Alps:

Google parsed the set together with no user input, including an animation of the flight route from Helsinki to Geneva. The set, what G+ calls “story”, makes use of GPS coordinates and time stamps embedded in the files. More importantly and interestingly, algorithms also make educated guesses which of the photographs are the best ones and which can be left out.

The “story” functionality was launched with amazingly little fanfare one month ago, in May 2014.

It does not end here, however. The lake in the cover photo (Sääksjärvi, Southern Finland) was recognized to be a picture of a lake automatically. With no tagging. Just clever visual recognition algorithm “seeing” what the photo depicts.

Another example: the below search is done live in my Android phone, from tens of thousands of photographs in Picasa (no manually entered tags).

Google has not kept a lot of noise about the visual recognition functionality either, though it was announced already in 2013. (one of the reasons might be that the search is not that perfect yet — for example while searching for “soccer” photos works fine with zero false positives, for example “dog” yields tons of pictures that have no four legged friends at all. But these are but early phase hickups , methinks.)

Has all the tagging and organizing of photos until so far been done in vain? Probably yes. The algorithms will get better, allowing for more complex queries. “Build an album with the best family skiing pictures from Lapland between 2008 and 2011" should be what can be expect soon.

This time the lazy shall inherit the earth. The lack of self-discipline in tagging & sorting the photos will be forgiven. Sorry for the brave souls, this time your effort did not pay off! Big Data will win.