So I heard about the stories feature a while back looked at it once and it had made a nice collage out of one of my albums. Fun but not very exciting.
NOW however I took some photos and decided to go and see if it had made a story out of them. Instead I find several new stories made of old photos. The most interesting one took an entire collection of photos I took on a trip to Europe and organized them into a kind of travel log.
Now mind you these were taken years ago with a canon point and shoot, with nothing more than a date setting and certainly no GPS data. I didn't even have a smart phone at the time (they were just starting out).
Somehow however Google managed to pull the date from each photo to create a time line then scan every single photo to reference every landmark and major location! These spanned several countries and everyone was right on no weird errors for missing locations or anything...everything accounted for.
On top of it the original source album had several "mediocre" photos....ones that I had kept for posterity but were definitely B-Roll material. G+ Stories however somehow pick the BEST pictures out of all of them and ignored any photo that I would also consider not worthy. I don't know if that's a coincidence but it picked a huge number of pictures from the album so it seems like it should have missed the mark somewhere if it was just picking randomly. It also didn't include any duplicate photos of anything or anyone at a location like say just a different exposure unless it was from a vastly different angle.
I find technology like this amazing and very exciting. Stuff like this makes me feel like the future is already here but I know in a few years something like this is going to look quaint in comparison to whatever new thing they have in store.
NOW however I took some photos and decided to go and see if it had made a story out of them. Instead I find several new stories made of old photos. The most interesting one took an entire collection of photos I took on a trip to Europe and organized them into a kind of travel log.
Now mind you these were taken years ago with a canon point and shoot, with nothing more than a date setting and certainly no GPS data. I didn't even have a smart phone at the time (they were just starting out).
Somehow however Google managed to pull the date from each photo to create a time line then scan every single photo to reference every landmark and major location! These spanned several countries and everyone was right on no weird errors for missing locations or anything...everything accounted for.
On top of it the original source album had several "mediocre" photos....ones that I had kept for posterity but were definitely B-Roll material. G+ Stories however somehow pick the BEST pictures out of all of them and ignored any photo that I would also consider not worthy. I don't know if that's a coincidence but it picked a huge number of pictures from the album so it seems like it should have missed the mark somewhere if it was just picking randomly. It also didn't include any duplicate photos of anything or anyone at a location like say just a different exposure unless it was from a vastly different angle.
I find technology like this amazing and very exciting. Stuff like this makes me feel like the future is already here but I know in a few years something like this is going to look quaint in comparison to whatever new thing they have in store.