Google Photos updates announced at I/O 2018

AI and Machine Learning were a big focus on this year's I/O developer conference for Google, and another service which was treated to these enhancements was Google Photos. In the coming months, Google Photos will be updated with a feature it calls 'Suggested Actions,' which as its name implies, will suggest actions on a per-photo basis.

This is much more than simple image enhancements as you will see. Even though it is applicable with a single tap!

Automatic Sharing of Photos with people in your photos

If you are taking some photos at a wedding, and Google recognizes one of your contacts are in the photos, it will recognize their face automatically and suggest that you share those photos with your friends. Google has been pretty impressive with this facial recognition feature in the past, and we will be interested to see how accurately it makes suggestions with these updates.

Document Scanning with OCR

Google Photos will allow you to scan documents with OCR (optical character recognition) with the new update. Capturing a photo of a document will allow the app to recognize that it is a document and automatically straighten the image, allowing you to convert it to a PDF for further editing, printing or sharing.

Automatic Image Enhancements

Google is improving its existing Image Enhancement feature on Google Photos with a few improvements to make your saves photos stand out even more.

Brightness Adjustments

If Google Photos detects a photo is under-or overexposed, it will automatically suggest a fix you can apply with a single tap.

Photo colorization

Applying color to a black and white photo takes a lot of time and skill. With the updated Google Photos, it will only take a tap. Google Photos will be able to detect monochormatic images, and offer colorization for them automatically.

While the outcome may not be perfect, the sample above shows some promise and convenience.

Other Miscellaneous effects and image enhancements

Another interesting feature Google showcased during its presentation was called 'color splash', which allows to enhance the color in a specific arena of a black and white photo, or conversely, desaturate a color photograph selectively.