Google’s new PhotoScan app (it’s on iOS too) is pretty good. Here’s a photo of the Marina in Cork my Dad took sometime in the nineties, probably. I’ll spare you the family photos! 🙂
There’s a lengthy Reddit thread on it too.
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Tag: google
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When is Android Pay coming to Ireland?
I’ll admit I haven’t been too excited about the whole “paying for things with my phone” hype. I think I may have used a contactless terminal in Mc Donalds once. But there was a system update for my Galaxy S7 Edge yesterday and early this morning I noticed a new application, Android Pay. Despite the early hour I quickly went through the setup process but adding the credit card from my Google account brought me to this screen:
Various searches on Google haven’t thrown up anything useful or hopeful. It’s anyone’s guess when Android Pay will go live here. Anyone know?
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The Google Now mini games are fun
Next time you launch Google Now tap on the Google Doodle and you’ll see the screen above.
They’re fun games you can play on your phone, all with a sporting, Olympic theme with cute fruity graphics!
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Searching for Animals
The stand alone Google Photos app went live last night and I’m playing with it this morning. I love that I can search my photos for animals, family or San Francisco and it will return meaningful results.
The app is really nice to use now, I love the new month view for quickly moving back through the years. I only wish Google Backup would work on all DNG files. Despite what their documentation says those files aren’t getting backed up. ðŸ™?
I’m not so fond of the limited editing features. Many of my older photos need to be rotated because they were shot in Jpeg and some app I used long ago changed the rotation bit in the files. To rotate I have to select an image, click the pencil to edit, click the crop tool, click rotate 3 times, save, X. Then move on to another. Hopefully they’ll allow batch editing of photos in the future.
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Find My Phone
Neat, search for find my phone using Google and it will tell you where your Android phone is! More here.
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Raw DNG Samples from the Nexus 5
Android L, the next major release of Android will allow apps to get raw data from the camera. This lets photographers extract more information and develop photos a lot more than they could with simple Jpeg files. They’ll be able to “push” the image further to recover blown out highlights and recover detail from shadows.
At least that’s the theory. You’re still working with the relatively small lenses and sensors in camera phones so they’re not going to compare to a DSLR or dedicated camera but images will get closer in quality.
This thread on r/Android has some samples of DNG files you can work on in Lightroom or whatever your RAW processor of choice is. The photos were taken with lcamera as the official Google camera app only records to Jpeg images. I took a stab at the “auto exposure” image here and came up with this:
That’s pretty good for a photo taken by a Nexus 5 at ISO 1635. Lightroom settings were as follows:
Settings:
- Temp: -1.65
- Tint: +59
- Exposure: -1.65
- Highlights: -100
- Shadows: 100
- Whites: +2
- Blacks: -29
- Clarity: +22
Detail
- Sharpening
- Amount: 67
- Radius: 1.0
- Detail: 10
- Masking: 70
- Noise Reduction
- Luminance: 20
- Detail: 50
- Contrast: 0
I’m really excited to see what Android L will bring to camera apps once it’s officially out in the wild and more phones have it installed!
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Google Cardboard
If you’ve been hankering after an Oculus Rift then Google Cardboard might be something you can use to whet your appetite for virtual reality. It’s basically a cardboard enclosure for your Android phone with two lenses, a magnet and NFC tag. Once assembled you launch the Cardboard app on your phone, put it in the enclosure and use the magnet at the side as a trigger button. Warning, there’s some NSFW language in the video below.
The Tested guys have a blog post with a few more insights and thoughts about Cardboard.
If anything, Google Cardboard brings more credibility to the rumor that Oculus is working with Samsung to create virtual reality goggle frames that can use Samsung Galaxy smartphones as the display. Cardboard’s cheap construction belies its effectiveness–the secret sauce here is in the 40mm lenses and the brilliant magnet-based trigger button.
I’d love to try one out. I wonder if I can get those lenses anywhere nearby?
tl;dr: if you upload a large number of photos Google may stop you uploading new photos to Google Plus. I’m not sure how long the penalty stays in place or if it is lifted at all.
A few weeks ago I decided to use the desktop Auto Backup tool to make a copy of my photo archive on G+. I have over 155,000 photos but I have a relatively slow upload speed of about 50KB/s so I knew it would take a while.
The upload was working fine, Google Awesome started doing it’s #Awesome job making animated GIFs and enhancing photos. Old photos I hadn’t seen in years popped up in stories and animations and I shared some of them too. It all came to a crashing halt last weekend. My photo archive on G+ stands at just over 100,000 images.
First of all the auto backup app stopped working. It did this a few times but by restarting the upload worked again. Not so this time. Then I noticed photos from my phone weren’t being backed up to G+.
I then tried uploading a photo from my photoblog four days ago but that failed too!
Here’s what happens if I try to upload a photo and share it on Google Plus:
Here’s what it looks like when I try to upload files to the photo uploader:
I did find this post by Brian Rose from 2011 which appears to be the only place a Google employee has discussed these limits. Unfortunately it’s not clear if this is a temporary cool down or permanent ban on uploading.
Hi everyone, thanks for your kindly emails. 🙂 The original issue reported here should have been resolved in July 2011, but our team has created additional confusion because Picasa uses a generic “Server rejected” error message rather than a more specific error code. There are limits to both filesizes per video (up to 1 GB) and to the number of bytes you upload to your Google account in a certain timeframe. I can’t provide exact details about those limits because they help us address abuse, but the more recent reports I see in this thread look more like what is reported at https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/topic/picasa/5OVjFio8k54/discussion
That’s also a long thread, so to summarize:
If you’re trying to transfer a large quantity of photos (totaling well over 1 GB) in a short amount of time, you may see our Error 17 or Server rejected errors.
Photos that are uploaded to Picasa Web are saved on your Google account, they do not need to be re-uploaded to Google+. A photo you upload to Picasa Web will be accessible from Google+, and vice versa.
This isn’t related to the amount of free space you have in your storage quota, it’s about the number of bytes you’re pushing to your Google account in a certain timeframe. Deleting photos to free up space shouldn’t have any positive effect.
We’re constantly monitoring how many people hit these server errors and making tweaks to improve the experience for people who regularly share many photos or videos. Since this thread no longer addresses the original issue reported, I’ll lock this discussion to new replies but you can continue discussing this on the thread I linked to above at https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/topic/picasa/5OVjFio8k54/discussion, thanks.
I found out I can upload files to Google Drive and share them from there but that’s hardly a suitable alternative.
So, why doesn’t the Auto Backup desktop app warn us that this might happen? I’m not the only one to hit this. Comments on this post suggests it might be a temporary ban of 14-30 days but I suspect that’s only a guess.
Meanwhile, Google is still trying to get me to use Auto Backup!
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NASA + Google = SPHERES
This is quite amazing. Google and NASA are working on robots that will float around the International Space Station helping astronauts or perform maintenance activities independently on station. I love the zero G test of the SPHERE in the video. It looked like a lot of fun!
I found this video on Johnny Chung Lee’s blog post. I remember I started following after he blogged about hacking the Wii motion controller a few years ago. Now into space? Great!
Since the summer of 2013, the Project Tango team has been working closely with a team at the NASA Ames Research Center. The goal: to integrate a Project Tango prototype onto a robotic platform, called SPHERES, that flies inside the International Space Station. The SPHERES program aims to develop zero-gravity autonomous platforms that could act as robotic assistants for astronauts or perform maintenance activities independently on station. The 3D-tracking and mapping capabilities of Project Tango would allow SPHERES to reconstruct a 3D-map of the space station and, for the first time in history, enable autonomous navigation of a floating robotic platform 230 miles above the surface of the earth.
Project Tango and SPHERES are scheduled to be launched into orbit this summer. The future is awesome.
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The Blue Isles
I don’t play Ingress much these days but this is impressive. The UK and Ireland are all blue thanks to Resistance effort. I’m looking forward to reading the mission report.
