Slashdot Mirror
How Google Photos Became a Perfect Jukebox for Our Memories (medium.com)
Google Photos, introduced in 2015, has become one of the most emotionally resonant pieces of technology today. It is also shaping our narratives along the way, writes The New York Times' Farhad Manjoo. From a story: Google's computers can recognize faces, even as they age over time. Photos also seems to understand the tone and emotional valence of human interaction, things like smiles, giggles, frowns, tantrums, dances of joy and even snippets of dialogue like "happy birthday!" or "good job!" The resulting montage, synced to a swelling Hollywood score, mixed obvious highlights -- birthdays, school plays -- with dozens of ordinary moments of childhood bliss.
[...] This is what I mean about a sucker punch: Who expects software to make them cry? Images on Instagram and Snapchat may move you regularly, but Google Photos is not social media; it is personal media, a service begun three years ago primarily as a database to house our growing collections of private snaps -- and a service run mostly by machines, not by other humans posting and Liking stuff. And yet Google Photos has become one of the most emotionally resonant pieces of technology I regularly use. It is remarkable not just for how useful it is -- for how it has erased any headache in storing and searching through the tsunami of images we all produce. More than that, Photos is remarkable for what it portends about how we may one day understand ourselves through photography.
[...] This is what I mean about a sucker punch: Who expects software to make them cry? Images on Instagram and Snapchat may move you regularly, but Google Photos is not social media; it is personal media, a service begun three years ago primarily as a database to house our growing collections of private snaps -- and a service run mostly by machines, not by other humans posting and Liking stuff. And yet Google Photos has become one of the most emotionally resonant pieces of technology I regularly use. It is remarkable not just for how useful it is -- for how it has erased any headache in storing and searching through the tsunami of images we all produce. More than that, Photos is remarkable for what it portends about how we may one day understand ourselves through photography.
My favorite part of the article is the part where it says
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Ironically, I don't use Google Photos because I don't want Google to have that information. Yet to read an article about how I should give my information to Google, I must sign it to Google (or Facebook).
someone please tag this as 'advertisement'
And I do not care now that I have. The standards for "one of the most emotionally resonant pieces of technology today" seem to be pathetically low.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
>> Who expects software to make them cry?
Answer: Anyone who's dealt with Oracle
It's bad enough Google is tracking you all around as it it.....why would anyone want to give them PHOTO evidence of what they looked like, pictures of people associated with them and locations????
No thank you.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This thinly veiled advertisement sounds like the beginning of a Black Mirror episode.
Oh...hahaha....hehe...oh man, you ALMOST had me there till I read that part.
Good one!! Funny.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
My kid is 3yrs old and I got a video montage the other day entitled "how fast they grow up", it had about 2 dozen short video clips stiched together that were from longer videos I had uploaded over the past three years, ordered from the oldest to the newest (showing growing up). I was totally caught off guard by this.
#ImNotCryingYouAre
"Google Photos, introduced in 2015, has become one of the most emotionally resonant pieces of technology today" get your tongue out of Google's ass already, it's unseemly. You're going to get arrested for killing us with hyperbole, dude.
How Google Photos Became A Memory.
I mean, who, besides those being paid and those ignorant of Google's behavior towards it's services, would advocate intertwining a Google so intimately?
It's not just the privacy issues that keep me from using Google Photos. It's the fact that Google has a history of starting a service and then some time down the road, ending that service. I certainly wouldn't risk having the only copy of a photo hosted "in the cloud" like a lot of people do. With Google's free stuff, you always get what you pay for.
I keep copies on at least two of my computers, copies on an external hard drive, and pay real money for space to keep them online.