android-central: I/O Summary: Google Photos App

jeudi 28 mai 2015

I/O Summary: Google Photos App

At I/O 2015, Google tackled the information problem in mobile once more, this time through pictures: “how incredible is it that we all have a camera in our pockets at any moment? (…) These moments tell your story (…)[but] taking more pictures and videos makes it harder to relieve memories due to the sheer volume”. This is why they are revamping Google Photos and centering it around 3 big ideas:

Creating a home for all photos and videos that is fast intuitive and beautiful.
A system to help your organize.
A system to help you share your life moments.

Google photo automatically backs up and syncs all photos and videos with Google Drive, and it understands their time and context to arrange them in a timeline that allows you scroll back as far as possible (depending on earliest file) in time. Google wants to make every interaction feel fast, and by swiping to the right you can access your collections which include montage movies that you have saved.

The app also helps you organize and bring moments to life. Using machine learning, it understands what’s truly important and organizes pictures by people, places, and everything that matters in your life. You can select a person and go all the way back to the first picture you took or saved of said person – and from what was shown, even when they were babies (if that part was automated, we should be pretty scared). Easy video editing is included as well, and it is easy to change the theme, soundtrack and reorder clips.

There are new gestures for multi-picture selection. Google also wants to make it easy to share what matters, “no strings attached”. You just tap “get a link”, and in less than a second you get a link to all selected items. You can also share it anywhere without worrying about the recipient having a particular app. This ultimately means you are sharing high quality content without needing to login or download any app. And on top of that, Google Photos will offer unlimited online storage for free, at a resolution of 16MP for pictures and 1080p for video. However, the pictures might still get compressed on unlimited storage, as their support page states that they “Save high-quality photos and videos while reducing size”.