Google+ Photo Search brings up images matching your keyword

This new Google+ feature is capable of recognising subjects – people, animals and objects in the user’s photos – both on the desktop version of the service and in the Android app...

Anuradha Shetty|May 22, 2013, 17:42:25 IST

Google's Tor Norbye has briefed users about a little known but impressive Google+ feature – Photo Search in Google+, in his blog post.

This new Google+ feature is capable of recognising subjects – people, animals and objects in the user’s photos – both on the desktop version of the service and in the Android app. You can start off by starting the Photos option by going to the left navigation bar and then selecting Search Photos from the menu button (top right).

To begin with, you can type any keyword in the search option and have results pertaining to that keyword show up.

Google+ Photo Search brings up images matching your keyword

An impressive feature, Photo Search in Google+ can help users type a particular keyword and have Google pull out relevant pictures. Of what is known at the moment, it may not pull out all pictures pertaining to that keyword, but the ones it is bringing out seem spot on.

In his post, Norbye has a picture of his photo search for "snake". He says, "I'm blown away by the new photo search in Google+ where it's recognizing subjects in my own photos -- here the various times I've run into snakes while hiking.

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It's unbelievable how the state of the art in computer vision has progressed recently. And I can't imagine the amount of number crunching that must have gone into all this picture processing!"

Yesterday's Google+ Android app update also brought in an improved Photos experience. The Auto Backup feature allows users to store their photos privately and safely as they click them. The auto highlight feature lets them look through a selection of top click from every set of photos that they add. Plus, there is auto enhance to make slight improvements to the people and places in the images automatically. Auto Awesome lets users create new versions of their images, say, by adding animations and panoramas based on the images.

To get started, all you have to do is upload a few shots, visit the Photos section of the updated app and view the Highlights. Here, users can also check out the enhancements by Google and remove them if they don't like it.