Big changes are coming to Google+, with an impressive set of automated filters and hashtags announced at Google I/O 2013 taking square aim at photographers of all stripes.
Photos in Google+ will now auto-correct images, tweaking things like contrast, brightness, noise, and skin smoothing.
(Credit: Google)Changes to the Google+ social network -- announced Wednesday at the Google I/O conference at the Moscone Center West here, and launching Wednesday as well -- include a new interface, some new Hangouts features, and most impressively, a series of automatic filters and hashtags for your photos. "Automatic filters," though, doesn't really do justice to how comprehensive they can be.
Google+ claims 190 million monthly active users, with around 390 million total users when including people brought in from other Google services like Gmail.
"We can analyze the picture itself to see what it is. [The image filters are] not good enough to know that it's Mick Jagger, but it can tell that if there's a guy on stage with lights and a crowd, that then it's a concert," Besbris said. "It will tag [the photo] as 'concert'."
Layouts and Hangouts
The changes made to the Google+ Stream interface, Hangouts, and Photos are myriad and a bit complex in scope, but their impact on the social network's fans should be immediate. These are changes made by the new Google, focused on gaining popular appeal, not the old Google that would've made nerdier changes because they seemed cool but were largely unwanted.
Google+'s layout has favored images since it launched in 2011, with large thumbnails accompanying posts. This hasn't changed, and has led to a lot of interest in the network from photographers looking for the kind of photographic-minded community that Google+'s Circles allowed them to build.
To further the goal of emphasizing images, the left-side nav bar has been moved to the top, and Hangouts are accessible through a green dialogue balloon with white quotes in it on the upper right.
They've been moved out of the way to clear space for higher-resolution video and photos to appear directly in your Stream, before you click on them. Posts basically look like Google Now cards, discrete units of information, which fade and flip out of the way or get bigger when you click them. They open large, consuming the horizontal center of your screen.
The Share box for creating a new post has been moved to the upper left, and bounces and moves the center of the screen when you click on it. It may sound a bit like the old HTML "blink" tag, although during a demo last week at Google's offices in Mountain View it appeared far less irritating than that relic of 1990s Web design.
Hashtags on posts have been moved to the upper right corner, so they're easier to see, but they're also now automatically added to posts. While you can still use whatever hashtags you want, which appear in a black font, up to three blue hashtags are added by Google based on context. Clicking either blue or black hashtag flips the post and shows connected posts in-line.
These Google-sourced hashtags can be removed individually from posts, or turned off entirely. And not surprisingly, the auto-hashtags leverage data from the Knowledge Graph.
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