Google Photos is a spectacular tool. Over the years it has improved to become not only an album for our photos, but also the space in which we can find our well-ordered photos without us having to do almost anything on our side.
Your categories are very powerful, it recognizes places and people, it shows us beautiful memories (which sometimes we want to delete for different reasons) and, in addition, the search engine is one of the main weapons and tricks of Google Photos. It looks like Google wants to refine it a bit more and is testing improvements to make this search engine more powerful.
Better recognition of natural language, the goal of the Google Photos search engine
When we open Google Photos, the truth is that the main screen is not too mysterious. Our photos and videos appear in chronological order, as well as the “stories” at the top. However, If we go to the search engine tab, we discover a lot of categories that the application created automatically.
Categories such as people (with their name if we have contacts), pets, places, type of buildings, flowers, sunsets… in short, lots of search parameters which are most useful when we want to find something quickly.
The truth is that it works well, but something better can always be done and Google thinks so too. In fact, in recent days, in its version of Google Web Photos, it has tested some improvements for the search engine. Some users saw a blue message “try a more powerful search” with some ideas for a more complex search.
The idea is that we stop searching with a single word or with a word and a place (for example, “Berlin Cathedral”) and let’s search with a more natural language like “Manolete in the Berlin Cathedral” or “Manolete and Cipri on the beach”. This, of course, if the faces have been tagged.
Complex research test | Image by 9to5Google
You can also search without a person appearing, for example “colorful sunset”. This is the one used by 9to5Google and it returns results by relevance, not by date the photos were taken.
For now, this feature is not implemented in Google Photos globally or in Android. It seems that little by little they will extend the function, but for the moment it is an experiment so that, according to the statements of a Google representative to 9to5Google, one can find and relive memories more easily thanks to filters of more complex research.
We will see how long it takes to leave the realm of “experimentation” to reach both the web version and, above all, our Android phones.
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