Google Photos will make organizing your pictures a thing of the past

Think of Google Photos as Gmail for pictures, said Google vice president Bradley Horowitz. Before Gmail existed, Horowitz recalled, he’d obsessively file away every email. But as the emails started to pile up, that practice became unsustainable. “E-mail would have been all I did if that model had stuck,” Horowitz said Thursday, during a press event at the Google I/O developers conference. Google Photos is an attempt to apply the Gmail model to still images and videos. Instead of expecting you to manage every photo, Google Photos wants you to surrender to the power of search and algorithms, which can recognize and sort everything on their own. “We’ve reached a point with the journey of photos where I think the system can take care of that tedium for you,” Horowitz said. Viewing a demo of Google Photos in action, it’s hard not to be mesmerized by the power of algorithms and machine learning. Google Photos can automatically recognize specific people, places, and things, sorting them into collections through which you can browse or search. Want to look up that taco you ate on a recent vacation? Just type “food in Hawaii” into the search box. Want to look through pictures of your daughter? Google Photos can recognize her face, all the way back from when she was just a baby.