Speaker 1: Google Photos gets even more helpful features.
Speaker 2: What's going on. I'm Rich Damiro. This is Rich on
Speaker 2: Tech Daily. Well, if you've.
Speaker 1: Listened to me or watched me on TV at all,
Speaker 1: you know that Google Photos is one of my favorite
Speaker 1: apps on my phone. I love talking about this service
Speaker 1: because to me, there's not a better free way to
Speaker 1: back up and organize your pictures.
Speaker 2: You get unlimited storage.
Speaker 1: It works on both iOS and Android, and I always
Speaker 1: tell folks you need your pictures backed up in two places,
Speaker 1: a free app like Google Photos and somewhere else. That way,
Speaker 1: if one of the backups goes out, you still have
Speaker 1: the other one. Recently, I was up at Google Io,
Speaker 1: their big developers conference, and I got to talk to
Speaker 1: David Lieb. He's the product lead at Google Photos, and
Speaker 1: I wanted to know all about the app, which is
Speaker 1: getting some new.
Speaker 2: Features, and if you can believe it, it's been around
Speaker 2: for three years now.
Speaker 3: We launched Google Photos three years ago at Google Io,
Speaker 3: and our approach was that it's gotten really hard to
Speaker 3: deal with all your photos. You take some any photos
Speaker 3: on your phone, on your camera, you've got all those
Speaker 3: old photos from your hard drive. We wanted to build
Speaker 3: one place that you could keep all your photos and
Speaker 3: then make them as useful as possible to you.
Speaker 1: So one reason I love Google Photos is that it
Speaker 1: gives you unlimited storage, so you can free up valuable
Speaker 1: space on your phone.
Speaker 2: And like I said earlier, it works cross.
Speaker 1: Platform iOS, Android, desktop, and anywhere else you might want
Speaker 1: to access your pictures.
Speaker 3: One of the core tenets of Google Photos is one
Speaker 3: place to keep all your photos that is accessible on
Speaker 3: all the devices you have today and into the future.
Speaker 3: So if you go get a new smartphone, you don't
Speaker 3: have to deal with anything. Just sign into your Google
Speaker 3: Photos account, all your photos are there accessible to you.
Speaker 1: One of the new features announced at Google Io is
Speaker 1: called one Tap Actions. Basically, Google Photos is using AI
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence to help you fix things in your photos
Speaker 1: without doing a lot of work.
Speaker 3: One of the things we've noticed is that there's a
Speaker 3: lot of work dealing with your photos, and so we
Speaker 3: noticed that people don't want to do that work. So
Speaker 3: one of the things we watch today is a feature
Speaker 3: that lets you kind of take those actions on your
Speaker 3: photos in a way that's really easy. So, for example,
Speaker 3: if you're swiping through your photos and you happen upon
Speaker 3: a photo that's too dark. Google Photos will understand that
Speaker 3: and put a button right there for you to tap
Speaker 3: once and brighten the image. If you have photos of
Speaker 3: your friends that you've forgotten to share, Google will understand
Speaker 3: that and give you one tap to share those photos
Speaker 3: with those friends.
Speaker 2: I can't wait to use this new feature.
Speaker 1: You can finally take a photo of a document and
Speaker 1: Google Photos will ask if you want to convert it
Speaker 1: into a PDF.
Speaker 2: That's going to come in handy.
Speaker 3: We often take photos of documents that we need to
Speaker 3: sign and then like scan and send back to someone,
Speaker 3: but none of us has a scanner anymore, and so
Speaker 3: we realize that we could apply AI to that problem
Speaker 3: and take something that is really burden some and make.
Speaker 2: It really easy for you.
Speaker 1: Another cool effect rolling out right now is called color pop,
Speaker 1: and it's all thanks to artificial intelligence.
Speaker 3: We have the more creative side of AI for this
Speaker 3: color pop feature, where we take a photo that you
Speaker 3: have of your kid, your friends, and we can recognize
Speaker 3: that the subject is different from the background of a
Speaker 3: photo and then segment them, keep the subject in right color,
Speaker 3: and then turn the background to black and white so
Speaker 3: you get this fun artistic effect.
Speaker 1: Those pictures will be perfect for Instagram, until, of course,
Speaker 1: we're all doing that, and then we'll have to move
Speaker 1: on to something else that's new. Finally, Google Photos is
Speaker 1: working on a way to add color to your old
Speaker 1: black and white pictures.
Speaker 3: The way we think about it is a human can
Speaker 3: look at a black and white photo and guess at
Speaker 3: what colors which parts of the photo are. You look
Speaker 3: at the grass and you understand that would be green.
Speaker 3: You look at the sky, you understand that would be blue.
Speaker 3: What we've done is we've basically showed our AI systems
Speaker 3: a bunch of photos, and they've learned over time what
Speaker 3: things in photos are, what colors. So that's how we
Speaker 3: do it. It's really amazing.
Speaker 1: One final question I had for David, is Google Photos
Speaker 1: working on a way to filter out all the duplicates
Speaker 1: of my collection?
Speaker 2: Now Google Photos.
Speaker 1: Does roughly filter out duplicates if you try to upload
Speaker 1: the same photo twice, but I find that the system
Speaker 1: is pretty easily tricked if something about the file or
Speaker 1: the picture is slightly different, So I do end up
Speaker 1: having a bunch of the same pictures in my collection. Now,
Speaker 1: he wouldn't give me a concrete answer, but he basically said,
Speaker 1: I should not waste my time right now manually searching
Speaker 1: into leading the duplicates in my Google Photos collection, so
Speaker 1: that is a good sign.
Speaker 2: Now, I'm sort of a neat freak.
Speaker 1: So even though these duplicates don't take up any extra
Speaker 1: storage in my account, I would rather have everything perfectly
Speaker 1: organized and arranged, and it sounds like Google is using
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence to get me towards that goal.
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Speaker 2: Thanks so much for listening. I'm Rich Demiro rich on
Speaker 2: tech dot tv. I'll talk to you real soon.