Google Photos Assistant

Technology and Internet
#1

So I’ve sold my soul to Google and uploaded all my photos to Google Photos. It’s pretty amazing what it does auto tagging things including people, places and scenes (like “beach” or “snow”) beyond their location.

The assistant thingy auto generates little flash backs to different years in the past “on this day” type of stuff as well as creates collages, little videos of events etc etc.

But the question is, can you control that at all?

For example, it created a video called “they grow up so fast” of one of my kids. It was short video clips which it’s auto tagged of him over the last year, a couple of minutes long with background music and all. It’s pretty awesome for something I had to put zero effort into.

What would be great is being able to tell it to generate the same thing for each of my other kids… or pick a different time period… or event or whatever then let it’s do it’s magic and spit out a video for me??

Sure I could put effort in and do it myself manually (my wife already creates a photo book (actually two) each year showing our adventures over the year that we can sit and flick through)… but when magic makes it happen… that’s cool :smiley:

#2

It’s worth saying that you can do something like this on the iOS (and Android apparently) app, but you have to select your own photos/video, download them and let the phone do the work… It’s almost there, but not quite.

On a side note, is it possible to do this on the desktop at all? Through Chrome or Safari rather than on the phone?

#3

I had something similar “pop” up on Atv 4,the other night.

Younger daughter’s “life” was very cool, brought back some awesome memories.

Haven’t looked into it any further, but I like it and agree, if you could choose from a “face”, then the magic happens

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#4

This is a feature included in Photos for iOS too.

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#5

I think you go to https://photos.google.com/ if you want to manage them on the web. I also believe they have some kind of a upload application that can check the computer for photos as well.

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#6

We use Photos to share photos with the family across the country, there are a few shared albums for different audiences that the different family groups can add things to. This drives the screen saver on the ATV and I can see how to create a ‘slide show’ from that source but didn’t see a way to save it. I don’t actually even sync those images from Apple Photos to my desktop anymore (it’s all on the Phones) since I didn’t need that large chunk of space taken up… even with only the shared ones.

Out photo library is about 1TB and has over 200,000 images, not something I have space on the desktop to deal with in a single library, part of the reason I love having it sit in Google photos! (I am using the free tier, but for my purposes, it’s more than enough).

While I have the Google Photos app installed on my iPhone, I mainly (99.9%) use the web site to view my photos. I have also have the desktop uploader app sitting in a VM on my NAS pushing all the photos our family takes onto the web automagically.

Interestingly this morning I see a few extra videos pop up, one for each of the other kids! Very nice.

That’s the dream, feed it some basic parameters like face(s), date/time period, location, media type and then define how long your video should be eg 1/3/5/10 minutes. Then click, magic!

I get this might be an amount of CPU resources that Google might not want to give away for free but theoretically (and like the iOS apps) use your local resources to build the video or potentially build it into a premium stand-alone offering or include it with the paid Google Drive offering.

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