“Wait I will show you the photos from that trip”, and that marks the end of conversation right there while you dig through the thumbnails of thousands of photographs. Apple, at the first day of WWDC 2016, announced that it is going to fix this with the new Photos app in iOS 10. Apple is changing how your image gallery is organised by leveraging facial recognition technology. This allows for one to find the required images easily.

We have seen similar feature on Google Photos earlier however there is one significant difference if we go by Apple’s claims. The computer vision tech used by Apple is native to your device which means that the unlike Google Photos, the images don’t have to uploaded to cloud. It also gets object recognition to allow finding specific images containing the items. If you are the kind of person who relies heavily on mobile camera while travelling, you are going to love this addition. You can simply look up images with mountains, food or some people you travelled with.

Apple claims that to do so, the phone carries out over 11 billion computations for each photograph. Not only have they allowed to group and find images easily using this technology but also used the computer vision and location data together to offer ‘Memories’.

‘Memories’ is an interesting use of the data your phone now has about the photos. Using the facial recognition and AI, it couples up related photos and videos into mini movies. This is like TimeHop, only much smarter yielding better results. Instead of just putting together some old media from a specific date, ‘Memories’ seems to be able to give better result including elements around the same theme.

We have previously seen Apple picking up small bits from the technologies already seen in the market to improve upon and build into products that improve user experience. ‘Memories’ looks like one such example. The demo during WWDC 2016 looks promising and we look forward to try the feature soon once the iOS 10 starts rolling out.

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This is an interesting news for tech-savvy people, especially travellers! Google Photos – a photograph and video sharing and storage service by Google – has rolled out a notable update on iOS. The iPhone and iPad application now supports Live Photos.

With this interesting feature, the users will be able to store, view and organise their Live Photos in the mobile app, even after they have been removed from the Camera Roll. Prior to this, the animated photo format was introduced with iOS 9 and the newer iPhone 6s and 6s Plus devices.

How does it work?

After Live Photos have been uploaded to Google Photos on iOS, the users can Force Touch on the image in order to see them animate. The images are also designated with the “Live Photo” icon at the top of the screen, so the users can know they are not just a static image. Having said that, if you download the Live Photo from Google Photos back to your device, the content will no longer remain animated. However, if the backed-up Live Photo is saved to the Camera Roll, it will then be playable in the Apple Photos App.

What’s in it for travellers and travel marketers?

Travellers can use the updated Google Photos to a whole new level altogether. While exploring the different international and domestic destinations, trippers can capture the beautiful travel moments in an easier manner. Movements in the landscape, behaviour of animals and expressions of people can be recorded conveniently. This content format is particularly helpful to people who are in two minds about taking a video or photo. Live Photos are something between automatic GIFs and short video clips.  Since they are usually small in size, travellers won’t have to bother about the memory space of their mobile phones. This encourages shareability of the content with travel companions too. Beyond that, travel brands can use Live Photos for marketing the popular destinations.They can experiment further with this feature.

Google Photos is not the first third-party service to add the technical support for Apple’s specialised image format. Social Media platforms like Facebook and Tumblr back this form of content too. How will Google Photos fare against these brands is yet to be seen.

Download Google Photos iOS app here.

Source: TechCrunch

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Open the app categories on Google Play store and Photography proudly sits on the top. As the OEMs continue to improve the cameras with every new device, a large number of people, especially the ones who travel a lot, are giving the elbow to their DSLRs. That is why we have listed down some apps that will take care of your photography needs while travelling.

#1- Google Camera

I have tried using various camera apps but Google Camera continues to be my favourite. While it might not offer you the wide array of options you get on other camera apps, it takes the cake when it comes to simplicity. Switching between camera modes is fast which is good as you don’t want to miss a good shot from the train window because your camera was on video. It offers other camera modes like panorama, wide angle, fisheye, photosphere and lens blur which work very well. There are no filters for you to use but then you can always add them later using some other app.

Download link

#2- Snapseed

If you want an app to process your photos, Snapseed is the right pick. You can use it to fine tune the image settings, alter the perspective, fix badly exposed parts, heal patches and do a lot more you would otherwise use Photoshop for. Using the app is also pretty simple and it largely relies on gestures. Scroll vertically to select setting and scroll horizontally to change it. It can also process RAW images so you can transfer your DSLR images and process them on your smartphone. It also offers some filters but there aren’t many options if that is what you are looking for.

Download link

#3- Camera360

I have been using this app for years now and it has never disappointed. While it first started off as a camera app that also offers some filters, it now doubles up as a quick photo processing tool. You can use it to shoot photos and have more options than your stock camera app or you can choose from the wide range of filters to put on the images you have captured already. New filters can also be downloaded inside the app. It also offers the option to fine tune some image settings if filters are not your thing.

Download link

#4- Cardboard camera

If you think shooting photographs is too mainstream, you should download the Cardboard Camera app. It can shoot 360 degree panoramas that you can later view in your Cardboard viewer. It doesn’t work very well if you are shooting objects too close so make sure you capture the beautiful landscapes you encounter while travelling. It can also record audio along with that so a flowing river and chirping birds will add to your viewing experiences. If you don’t have a cardboard viewer, you can buy one online for really low prices.

Download link

#5- Google Photos

You will click photos, save edited copies, shoot videos and then do all of that again until you eventually run out of space. Then you will start filtering through the images to make space for more. You can save all the trouble if you use Google Photos. You can use your Google storage to save photos and free up space on your device. If that isn’t enough, you can have unlimited storage if you allow them to keep a slightly reduced size of the image. It also makes sharing images and collectively contributing to the same album a breeze.

Download link

What other photography apps do you use while travelling? Do share with us.

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From apps to photos, everything is getting storage hungry. The fact that manufacturers are dropping memory card slots and that the newer Android versions require more space doesn’t help either. Most people with 16 GB devices filter through the pictures, delete them, resize them and transfer them to other devices. Cloud storage helps to some extent but then managing individual uploads separately is a painful process, especially while travelling. Avid travellers prefer to travel light and don’t really like to carry around multiple devices to backup the pictures they click during the journey.

Now Google Photos has made it easier to save storage of your device. It already saves a copy of your photos on cloud but the latest version of Google Photos app offers you the option to clear up storage on your device by deleting the photos that have been uploaded to cloud. This is much easier than cleaning up individual images that you have backed up somewhere. The new feature will delete all the original photos from your device in just one click and they will remain accessible to you when you are connected. So as soon as you get Wi-Fi access at your hotel or a coffee shop, you can clear up the space and be ready for another day of clicking photos.

Google Photos will keep track of the storage on your device and will present you with the option to delete offline copies of the images if the device storage is running low.

To ensure that you don’t accidently tap on the option in settings, it presents you with a confirmation for the same. When you access Google Photos on desktop, you will have the option to select the image size you want to keep. If you retain the original size of the image, the storage will be taken up from your allocated 15 GB Google Drive space but if you choose to store a resized version of the images, you have got unlimited storage.

This can be a great option for people who use mobile phones for their travel photography and find it hard to manage with limited storage space. The ‘High Quality’ (unlimited storage option) offers image quality that is good enough for most uses and you can have the photos available on all your devices with Google Photos. The feature is available for Android devices for now and will be coming to iOS devices soon.

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