5 takeaways from our Visual 1st fireside chat

with Google Photos’ John Fisher



John Fisher, Sr. Director of Engineering, Google Photos

Photo: Mikkel Aaland

2. Customer needs do evolve, and so should your features – but while keeping your mission in mind.

It’s easy – and often tempting – to stick with a successful solution and only iterate the features that initially spurred the solution’s success.

It’s equally tempting to jump on the “latest and greatest” trends, and to compete with the developers launching them.

Google Photos managed to avoid both quagmires. It started in 2015 as a cloud-based photo storage and management service, leveraging Google’s Search prowess as its main competitive differentiator. Google Photos has since evolved to become a solution for consumers to visually document their life’s story and to revisit important moments of their past. To further support this focus, Google Photos has also added other media types such as maps, text and video, to provide context to these memorable moments.

As more and more consumers have come to expect having these features at their fingertips, Google Photos has more recently added easy-to-use features for correcting or creatively enhancing consumers’ photos.

All of this remains guided by Google Photos’ core mission to enable visual storytelling and reminiscing.

3. The bottom line matters – even for Google. And consumers are willing to pay when they see that value exceeds costs.

How long can a no-advertising photo cloud service continue to provide unlimited photo storage to 1 billion monthly users? Well, not forever. So, in 2019, 4 years after its initial launch and around the time that Google Photos passed the 1 billion user mark, Google determined that it could not continue to provide unlimited photo storage for free. It decided to require a Google One storage subscription for new storage exceeding 15 gigabytes, starting at $19.99/year. 

As we’ve also heard previously at Visual 1st from Don MacAskill, CEO of Flickr/SmugMug, there’s no way to avoid charging for photo storage services if these are intended to serve their customers for the long haul.

The effect on Google Photos after cancelling free unlimited photo storage? Its user base grew 40%, to 1.4 billion monthly active users. 

4. Being part of a gigantic company slows down – but also speeds up – innovation.

It’s only natural to expect that, the larger a company, the more product development will be slowed down by regulatory, brand adherence, or other corporate requirements. While these do indeed slow down development to some extent, Google Photos has also been able to stay agile and innovate fast by leveraging the brain power and other resources it can draw from other Google divisions, including those involved in AI, smartphone camera, cloud storage or video app development (such as DeepMind, Pixel, Google One and YouTube).

5. Tying features to computing platforms requires careful balancing between the benefits of maximal deployment, platform revenues, and platform-specific optimization.

These days not all Google Photos feature are available to all Google Photos users. 

For instance, some of Google Photos’ AI-based features were originally launched on the Google Pixel phone, thus giving the device an additional competitive boost, before these features were implemented for all Google Photos users. 

Other features specifically leverage the Pixel camera or its processors, giving those Google Photos users an optimal on-the-edge and real-time photo engagement experience. 

Features such as the recently announced Video Boost are so computing-intensive that they require processing in the Google Cloud.

At this point however, the vast majority of Google Photos features are platform-agnostic and can be used by all. Hardware- or cloud-specific features are the exception rather than the rule.

And a few more things...

From L to R:

co-moderator Elodie Mailliet Storm, Jae Lee, Iz Shalom

Photo: Mikkel Aaland

More coverage of Visual 1st, including attendee video interviews, at The Dead Pixels Society

Twelve Labs CEO Jae Lee announced that Twelve Labs closed a $10M strategic funding round from Nvidia, Intel and Samsung Next, bringing its total raised to $27M. Twelve Labs is a B2B video curation solution, whose models map natural language to what’s happening inside a video, including actions, objects and background sounds, allowing developers to create apps that can search through videos, classify scenes and extract topics from within those videos, automatically summarize and split video clips into chapters, and more. Twelve Labs won our Visual 1st Best Technology award last year.

Sony a9 III. A game-changer in camera land – hello, Global Shutter! I rarely cover camera news, not only because there are already so many excellent publications just focused on that, but also, frankly, most camera innovation in recent years hasn’t been that exciting, i.e. has been primarily incremental – until this week when Sony announced their a9 III camera, which features the holy grail of a global shutter in a full frame sensor. 

The benefits: super-fast shutter speed (long coveted by sports, wildlife, and action photographers), none of the distortion artifacts that plague rolling shutter cameras when moving or panning cameras too fast, creative flash options by eliminating the flash sync ceiling. And the list goes on. 

PlanetArt. PhotoCalendars. PlanetArt, the company behind FreePrints, Gifts.com, CafePress, Ink Cards and several other consumer brands, knows a thing or two about naming their products and marketing them through compelling URLs.

New kid on the block: PhotoCalendars (yes, the apps can be found on photocalendars.com), a wall calendar creation app that can be customized with one’s own smartphone photos or photos from other sources. The app offers branded themes options (such as featuring Peanuts, Garfield, or SpongeBob) and the user can add personal calendar events as well as national and religious holidays of their choice.

Google. About this Image updates. When you find images in your Google Search returns, the new About this Image Search feature lets you view the image’s history (has it previously been published on other webpages? This could give an indication of whether the image is being taken out of context and shared in relation to a current event, but it’s actually much older).

About this Image also lets you learn how other sites, e.g. news or fact checking sites, use and describe the image.

Finally, you’ll be able to view metadata - when available - that image creators and publishers might have added to an image, including fields that may indicate that the image has been generated or enhanced by AI.

In other words, About this Image gives you a sense of how reliable or misleading an image could be – nothing ironclad, but conceptually helpful as an initial indication.

Amazon & Google. Generative AI: it’s for ecommerce, stupid. In the same week in which we proclaimed in our Visual 1st Keynote that segmenting or 1-on-1 personalizing ecommerce images constitute the biggest potential for AI-generated image tech in the foreseeable future, both Amazon and Google announced their respective generative AI solutions for ecommerce customers. 

Amazon Ads launched image generation in beta, a feature that enables advertisers to replace photos or photo backgrounds with lifestyle and brand-themed images, based on the product’s details. The image can then be refined by entering short text prompts, while multiple versions can be quickly created and tested to optimize performance.

Google’s new AI-powered Product Studio enables its merchants and advertisers as well to leverage text-to-image AI capabilities to create new product imagery, simply by typing in a prompt of the image they want to use. 

DreamCraft3D. AI Image Generator for 3D Images. And what really helps to sell your products on e-commerce sites? The ability to show them from all angles. Creating photo realistic 3D images from scratch (i.e. AI prompts) is not an easy feat, but DreamCraft3D, developed at Tsinghua University, Beijing, shows some impressive samples. 

Moment. Pro Camera overhauling its video engine. Photo & video camera app Pro Camera, known for its advanced camera control settings, has released a new version that supports Apple’s iPhone 15 Pro camera updates and is based on a total overhaul of its video engine. As of this writing, the iOS app is # 1 in the photo & video category in the US App Store.

Best,

Hans Hartman