"Sort of mind blowing... A June 23rd article in Fortune Magazine about facial recognition and work Facebook is doing says: "The research took 40,000 public photos from the social network, some of which showed people with their faces fully visible to the camera and others with their faces partially or fully hidden. After running them through the recognition filter, LeCun said the system could determine a user’s identity with 83% accuracy. Using its existing algorithms, Facebook has said that it can recognize you with 98% accuracy—in fact, its software can identify you in one picture out of 800 million in less than 5 seconds". The last sentence is wow... not only is big brother watching you... The likes of Facebook are too... No pun intended".
Tonight, while exploring the new Google Photo's app (available on your computer or for your smartphone), I discovered what I think is a spin off of that facial recognition technology. Let's go back a bit to set this up right. In this digital age, we all have photo's everywhere... computer, smartphones, external storage drives and who knows where ever else. Ever try to find that one picture you know you have "somewhere"? I have a 64G iPhone... and I ran out of storage mainly because I have 1000's and 1000's of pictures stored on it. Honestly, it can be a pain looking for one that I know is there.Enter Google Photos. I downloaded the app... Sync'd my pictures from my smartphone... added the app on my computer and sync'd those picture and also my iPad. It is really pretty amazing how I can now launch the Google Photos app and I have all pictures from all 3 sources... viewable from any device. That part is pretty cool and handy. Now I have to go find all thos pictures on off line storage and add them, maybe.
The I started playing with the Google Photo search feature. Can you imagine going through tens of thousands of pictures and labeling them just so you can find them? How about sorting and putting the into folders yada, yada, yada. What a pain. It might not be necessary anymore. In the app, I decided to search for a picture of a car I took while at a Scentsy Reunion... didn't remember which one or where it was. In the search bar, I typed "car" and instantly, there were all my pictures of cars with a smattering of motorcycles and other motor vehicles, including the picture I was looking for.
Very cool and I don't even know what I'm doing. You can type in about anything you want. Don't know what you want? The app will even make suggestions. A series of thumbnails of people or topics are presented. All you need to do is click on one of those pictures and your find all the pictures of that person or topic. I searched for "snow" and guess what.... tons of winter scenes. Getting ingenious now, I went wild and searched for "car + snow" and as you might guess... cars in winter scenes. Pretty cool. Maybe.
If I understand it correctly, you can save an unlimited number of photos in the new app. This storage is seperate and different from the limits within Google Drive. Why? I don't know yet. But, Google is giving everyone the opportunity to upload as many photos as they want, for free. Google them has the ability to scan them and find who know what. It's likely all money based and will somehow be used to their advantage and financial gain... don't know how, why or when... but not only do we have the Big Brother (like the NSA), now we have Google. Ahh, free enterprise.
Here's the app: https://www.google.com/photos/about/
Here's the help: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6128838?hl=en
Here's the Community: https://plus.google.com/communities/115899483237483386886
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