GOOGLE PHOTOS IS THE SOFTWARE THAT MAKES US CRY
glimpse of the answer.
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.
There was baby Samara getting a haircut, taking a few unsteady steps; toddler Samara playing with her brother, fighting with her brother, taking a brave dip underwater in swim class; preschool Samara eating pizza on a road trip, sassing the camera with her tongue out. I can’t post the video here; it feels like showing you her diary. But if Samara ever runs for kindergarten class president, the Google montage could be her “Man From Hope” and she would win in a landslide.
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.
With its heavy focus on artificially intelligent curation, Google Photos suggests the dawning of a new age of personalized robot historian. The trillions of images we are all snapping will become the raw material for algorithms that will curate memories and construct narratives about our most intimate human experiences. In the future, the robots will know everything about us — and they will tell our stories.
The earliest incarnation of Google Photos was part of Google Plus, the search company’s ill-fated, just-shuttered social network. A few years ago, after realizing that social networking was not its forte, Google went back to the drawing board with Photos.
Its reimagined service would do three things: Offer nearly limitless storage for your photos essentially free (you can pay more to have your images stored in higher-resolution sizes). It put them in the cloud, so they could be accessed anywhere. And, crucially, Photos would lean on Google’s famed AI to address what it saw as the key problem of the smartphone era — the fact that we all take photos but rarely look at them.
“We noticed that you would never relive or reminisce about any of these moments,” said Anil Sabharwal, the Google vice president who led the team that built Photos, and still runs it. “You would go on this beautiful vacation, you’d take hundreds of beautiful photos, years would pass, and you would never look at any of them.”
When it started in 2015, Google Photos brought immediate relief. For instance, face recognition made sharing pictures automatic. Now, when I take a photo of my kids, Google recognizes them and shares those photos with my wife; her photos are shared with me. Incredibly, instantly, without thinking, we each have a complete collection of the children’s photos, and any anxiety about keeping them secure has vanished.
Then there are Google’s daily prompts to reminisce. It’s difficult to overstate how good Google’s machines are at mining your collection to find new stuff to awe you. In one series, called Then and Now, it will find pictures of the same person, or groups of people, in similar poses at two different time periods: Your children on the first day of school this year versus last year, or you in front of the Empire State Building 10 years ago and today.
Last month, Google released a new home device, the Home Hub, a voice-activated gadget whose screen shows a never-ending slideshow of this sort of nostalgia bait. It’s magical. I’ve had the Home Hub in my office for more than a week and it has deeply altered how I experience my photos. They have come alive.
And yet as much as I can’t quit Photos, I’m also vaguely terrified by what it promises about the future. There’s a raft of social science research that shows our memories are profoundly altered by pictures. One study has shown that mindlessly taking photos reduces our ability to recall events in the world around us. Photos also shape our sense of selves, even to the point of creating new memories — a false photo can convince you that something happened to you even if it never did.
The machines, now, are increasingly making sense of our human world — shaping our reality in the deepest way possible, and like cameras themselves, they’re inescapable.