Google+ Stories

[Google_Superuser]

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.

 

[B. Diddy]

It's pretty neat. It'd be interesting to see what the algorithm looks for. I'm guessing that it concentrates on photos with prominent smiling faces, group shots, scenery, and shots with a lot of color range.

 

[zorak950]

I lost all my Stories when I turned Auto Awesome off because it was adding that stupid falling snow to all my winter pictures.

 

[ElGargamel]

Google stories are fun, however, it seems quite difficult to add information to it (either in the browser or on my One+ 1)

For example I have an entire album from a trip to Canada and Google decided to make a story out of it, at first it looked like crap. Dates and location data were all wrong. This was because it was a mix of pictures from a photo camera and 2 iPhones. So I started to organize my entire album, adding the correct dates and location data. After that update, Google managed to rebuild 3 stories from that album. But I was hoping to get one big story from that entire trip, so I decided to delete the two smaller stories and rebuild the biggest one. No success. The story I have looks nice so far, but it fails to include the latter third of the trip :-\.

Does anyone know how to include more pictures/location data? Is there a way to tell google, look make me a story from that album within that timeframe? Supposedly you can edit photos (select photos that were taken on the same day), however, those pictures are not displayed in the options even though they were taken on the same day in the same area.

I like the idea, really, it just misses some proper editing options.