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Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos

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Re: Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos

#81

Uhm... I'm probably "consevative" but if I take a photo I want to have a photo of the moment and not "a variation of the moment"... o_O

I turn a lot of real photos into cartoons. I love the feature!

Most recently I took a photo of my grandma and me, asked Gemini to make it a cartoon, asked Gemini to make the new variant into a birthday card.

My grandma loved it! I was happy to make her something custom. Buying people cards just never felt right to me. Writing was also never my strongest suit - so this new form of expression for me has been enhancing :)

The only remaining thing I need to do better is getting the card printed! I wish that also was only 12seconds of work.

Re: Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos

#82
post #65

One of the reasons why I think Google Photos is pushing out this functionality is that these new AI-generated variations count toward your overall storage. So hey, you take a selfie, 3 MB. And now you want your selfie to show yourself posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall of China, and the Grand Canyon. OK, now you've added an additional 12 MB. Do that often enough, and you'll hav…

I upgraded to 2TB of storage since 15GB just wasn’t cutting it. Two years later, I’m already at a whopping 200GB!

Re: Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the company of the "I don’t know how to count that low" meme cares about 12MB.

Of course they don't. But if even a small percentage of their userbase uses this on even a small percentage of their photos, that amounts to a massive amount of storage. It doesn't cost Google very much to store all those images, but those users will have to pay for more storage. Even thought it isn't significant to Google when a single person does it, it becomes highly significant when millions of people do it.

This line of reasoning doesn’t make sense because 3MB is marginal for the amount of work put in to develop this feature.

Google photos offers a save as copy / save as original feature when editing photos and videos. Removing the save as original button would be cheaper and significantly more effective.

Re: Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immich didn't have encryption last time i checked, do you trust hetzner with your photos? I also use Immich, but on a local server (using tailscale to reach it from outside)

I’m personally wary of uploading too much private data to any host. I am also a customer of Hetzner, and rent a couple of bare metal servers. But I mostly use it to store data that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal if it was stolen by someone. I’ve previously experimented a bit with encrypted volumes that I manually decrypt over ssh, and even full disk encryption that I manually decrypt over ssh. My experience with H…

> I have experienced critical, unrecoverable hardware failure on Hetzner servers a couple of times over the years

How do they handle such situations?

Re: Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos

#86
post #65

One of the reasons why I think Google Photos is pushing out this functionality is that these new AI-generated variations count toward your overall storage. So hey, you take a selfie, 3 MB. And now you want your selfie to show yourself posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall of China, and the Grand Canyon. OK, now you've added an additional 12 MB. Do that often enough, and you'll hav…

Nope - its so they can sell you ads - it learns about your interests based on your prompts. That marginally increased storage space won't make much of a dent.

It's possible for two things to be true at the same time

Re: Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos

#87
post #39
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you never taken a time-sensitive photo that was otherwise perfect but has an annoying visual obstruction (e.g. traffic sign poles, a reflection on a windshield for photos taken out of a moving car etc.)?

No because it captures the moment.

People don't just use cameras as perfect recording tools, as wild as that sounds. Photos are also for expression. And so, editing can be used to enhance the expression part, getting the image away from the recording parts maybe, but closer to the original intention of taking that photo.

Re: Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll really be in the future when this feature allows looking around corners like in the movie.

You can already do that with some of the other AI generators. Whatever you see around the corner is all hallucinated of course.

Real-life Enemy of the State, but in the worst possible way.

Re: Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos

#89

What is happening on the Photos team? I know a lot of the core team has left already, but lately it really seems like they are cramming in AI functionality in a way that does not consider the whole experience and it truly feels bolted-on. First they tried to mess with regular search and had to leave in a setting for people to go out of their way to disable it. Google Photos used to be one of my most favorite apps. No…

[deleted]

Re: Android users can now use conversational editing in Google Photos

#90

Imagine one day that Tesla will only allow you to control your car with voice commands. It would be hilarious. Is conversation UX suitable for everything? I think not. Turn left, no other left, no the left after that left. No, damn it stop the car. /s

Conversational via text, not via voice

...but why not by voice? "Vibe editing" images by voice doesn't offend my 20+ years of developing Photoshop skills the way that typing-out an imagined conversation between MacGyver and a 1980s image-editing-computer does. Oddly, I can't explain why either.

----

What I dislike the most about "prompts" being the default input for AI models thesedays is the inability to "browse" its featureset to see what it's actually capable of. I don't want to spend minutes/hours throwing different natural-language commands at it to seeing if it understands chroma-keying from chromatic-aberration - or if it can do lossless JPEG block-level transformations. It's when something stops being a useful tool but a hinderance or even a toy (perhaps even with Achievements and microtransaction unlockables).

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