Google Photos Gets Helpful New Features

Google Photos gets even more helpful features.

What's going on. I'm Rich Damiro. This is Rich on Tech Daily. Well, if you've.

Listened to me or watched me on TV at all, you know that Google Photos is one of my favorite apps on my phone. I love talking about this service because to me, there's not a better free way to back up and organize your pictures.

You get unlimited storage.

It works on both iOS and Android, and I always tell folks you need your pictures backed up in two places, a free app like Google Photos and somewhere else. That way, if one of the backups goes out, you still have the other one. Recently, I was up at Google Io, their big developers conference, and I got to talk to David Lieb. He's the product lead at Google Photos, and I wanted to know all about the app, which is getting some new.

Features, and if you can believe it, it's been around for three years now.

We launched Google Photos three years ago at Google Io, and our approach was that it's gotten really hard to deal with all your photos. You take some any photos on your phone, on your camera, you've got all those old photos from your hard drive. We wanted to build one place that you could keep all your photos and then make them as useful as possible to you.

So one reason I love Google Photos is that it gives you unlimited storage, so you can free up valuable space on your phone.

And like I said earlier, it works cross.

Platform iOS, Android, desktop, and anywhere else you might want to access your pictures.

One of the core tenets of Google Photos is one place to keep all your photos that is accessible on all the devices you have today and into the future. So if you go get a new smartphone, you don't have to deal with anything. Just sign into your Google Photos account, all your photos are there accessible to you.

One of the new features announced at Google Io is called one Tap Actions. Basically, Google Photos is using AI artificial intelligence to help you fix things in your photos without doing a lot of work.

One of the things we've noticed is that there's a lot of work dealing with your photos, and so we noticed that people don't want to do that work. So one of the things we watch today is a feature that lets you kind of take those actions on your photos in a way that's really easy. So, for example, if you're swiping through your photos and you happen upon a photo that's too dark. Google Photos will understand that and put a button right there for you to tap

I can't wait to use this new feature.

You can finally take a photo of a document and Google Photos will ask if you want to convert it into a PDF.

That's going to come in handy.

We often take photos of documents that we need to sign and then like scan and send back to someone, but none of us has a scanner anymore, and so we realize that we could apply AI to that problem and take something that is really burden some and make.

It really easy for you.

Another cool effect rolling out right now is called color pop, and it's all thanks to artificial intelligence.

We have the more creative side of AI for this color pop feature, where we take a photo that you have of your kid, your friends, and we can recognize that the subject is different from the background of a photo and then segment them, keep the subject in right color, and then turn the background to black and white so you get this fun artistic effect.

Those pictures will be perfect for Instagram, until, of course, we're all doing that, and then we'll have to move on to something else that's new. Finally, Google Photos is working on a way to add color to your old black and white pictures.

The way we think about it is a human can look at a black and white photo and guess at what colors which parts of the photo are. You look at the grass and you understand that would be green. You look at the sky, you understand that would be blue. What we've done is we've basically showed our AI systems a bunch of photos, and they've learned over time what things in photos are, what colors. So that's how we do it. It's really amazing.

One final question I had for David, is Google Photos working on a way to filter out all the duplicates of my collection?

Now Google Photos.

Does roughly filter out duplicates if you try to upload the same photo twice, but I find that the system is pretty easily tricked if something about the file or the picture is slightly different, So I do end up having a bunch of the same pictures in my collection. Now, he wouldn't give me a concrete answer, but he basically said, I should not waste my time right now manually searching into leading the duplicates in my Google Photos collection, so that is a good sign.

Now, I'm sort of a neat freak.

So even though these duplicates don't take up any extra storage in my account, I would rather have everything perfectly organized and arranged, and it sounds like Google is using artificial intelligence to get me towards that goal.

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Thanks so much for listening. I'm Rich Demiro rich on tech dot tv. I'll talk to you real soon.