Google Photos - Who needs the NSA? :)

[sandbender]

Google have just launched their new online photo storage and viewing service, Google Photos.

Link here.

If you already have a gmail account and have ever used the Picasa photo service/app then all your existing albums and photos are viewable via the new service.

Unlimited storage for photos of a 'web optimised' size, you pay to store the full size version. Unlimited storage of videos of any size as long as the play time is less than fifteen minutes.

You can link your photos to Forums and blogs if you wish to.

A clean (to sparse?) interface.

Here is the groovy/spooky/creepy bit.

You can search for a photograph based on what you remember was in it!

I have about 20,000 photos up there, typing in the word 'fungi' revealed all my photographs of fungi, there is nothing in the file name or album title to suggest that these are photos of mushrooms. A machine worked that out!

Last month I'd tried to find a picture of my daughter standing in front of a large John Deere tractor, I new that it must haver been taken when she was about two, however there were too many pictures and I couldn't find it.

Today I typed the word 'tractor' into the search box and the picture I'd spent half an hour looking for was the forth hit.

So a handy service, albeit a terrifying vision of the future.

 

[Macaroon]

I too find this a somewhat terrifying vision of the future; but I suppose it's inevitable and we can only hope that those to whom the future belongs will be able to use the positives of this technology and find a way to minimise the negative aspects.

 

[mousey]

I remember my dad going on about this years ago [he was a programming lecturer], trying to get some image recognition software to recognise what items were in photos etc. Looks like it's happing then.

 

[vestlenning]

Have no fear, when the profit on oil gets too low stuff like this will not be a priority...

 

[Goatboy]

I remember my dad going on about this years ago [he was a programming lecturer], trying to get some image recognition software to recognise what items were in photos etc. Looks like it's happing then.

Remember talking to someone about this a few years back where they'd been "teaching" a type of neural net computer to find military equipment in the field from photos. This was to help go through the mass of info quicker than humans could do it. It learned to find tanks, but only if the picture was taken on a cloudy day. Seemingly all the learning pictures had been of military equipment in Europe where the weather is bad and sunny days confused it.
On the google/Picasa front been using it for a few years now. The facial recognition is pretty good, though not surprisingly a lot of my friends have beards. And things like hats, glasses and beards confuse it a bit. Though it did learn to pick out pictures of my dog over others.
Just be careful of your privacy settings or your pictures get splattered all over the net.

Sent via smoke-signal from a woodland in Scotland.