We all know that it’s all too easy to take dozens if not hundreds of shots at an event — and all too hard to sort through them all at a later time to see and share the good ones. Now Google will apply it search and image recognition technologies to consumer imaging, in its social service Google+.
Auto Highlight “helps you find your favorites faster by de-emphasizing duplicates, blurry images and poor exposures,” Google says, “and focusing instead on pictures with the people you care about, landmarks, and other positive attributes.”
The new free Google+ features will roll out over the next week. “Your darkroom is now a Google data center,” the company says. “Great pictures aren’t taken, they’re made. And it’s the making part that many of us don’t have time for. We’d all love to have photos that capture our vacations and birthdays and anniversaries the way we remember them. But wonderful images require lots (and lots) of work. We think everyone should be able to make beautiful photos, so today we’re launching a set of initiatives aimed at improving your photos automatically.”
Other new features include:
• Auto Backup/Instant Upload: automatically backs up mobile pics as they are snapped, with unlimited free storage for a “standard” size image of 2048 pixels wide.
• Auto Enhance improves brightness, contrast, saturation, structure, noise, focus, “and dozens of other factors automatically.”
• Auto Awesome creates a new image based on a set of photos. “If you upload a sequence of photos, we’ll try and animate them automatically,’ Goggle says. “Or if you send us a few family portraits, we’ll find everyone’s best smile, and stitch them together into a single shot.”
