Every year Google’s I/O conference in May lays out all the big things the internet giant is hoping to bring out over the next 12 months. This year’s offering just passed and, well, it wasn’t as exciting as conferences gone by. We got a cheaper smartphone and a bit of shading around the edges on stuff like privacy. Nothing major to grab the headlines.
Fortunately, however, Google has always been a bit slow in the implementation of its I/O conference promises, which means there are still some cool new Google innovations on the way from past I/O conferences. One such promise is now closer to fruition, and it is an absolute cracker.
Google Photos will soon have a colorize feature going into beta testing
At last year’s I/O conference, the buzzword was AI. Google was all about telling the world about the fancy things its impressive AI algorithms could do. There were many brags that grabbed the news, but a particularly cool feature was the AI-assisted colorize feature that Google was going to add to its Photos app.
Colorize takes black and white photos and then magically turns them into photos bursting with color. Colorizing black and white photos has been around for a while, but it has always needed a person to go in and decide what colors to add and to which objects. You can see some great examples of colorized images here and here.
The human process can be time-consuming, which must have been one of the reasons Google thought it would be a good idea to teach a machine to do it instead. Trouble is, it looks like training a machine to do it is a time-consuming process, too. Since Google announced the feature over a year ago, it has not been heard of again. In fact, we’re only hearing about the progress the team has made now, because Mashable called the Photos team out on their radio silence. In response to that, the Photos project lead, David Lieb, took to Twitter with a working example of Photo’s new Colorize feature.
2/ Here’s a photo of my 104yo grandmother on her wedding day, colorized with Google Photos on my phone. (You can see we have some work to do; my grandfather didn’t wear pink pants to his wedding!) pic.twitter.com/Ni8v0Bz3vg
— David Lieb (@dflieb) May 6, 2019
Lieb’s working example is quite impressive, but it does show the difficulties he and his team are facing. The AI has done an admirable job of adding colors to the black and white image, but it is clear that, in some instances, it adds the wrong colors.
The example does show, however, how easy it will be to colorize images when the feature finally lands on the Photos app. It looks like Colorize will show in the list of filters you can choose from when editing images.
The bad news though, is that although Lieb did mention that a beta version of the feature will be coming soon, he made no mention of a specific date or an expected time frame for that to happen.
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