Google has made a lot of noise about its in-house AI development. Thanks to its key position at the very heart of the internet, it enjoys a natural advantage when it comes to AI over other big players like Facebook and Microsoft. One of the key products that Google has been augmenting with AI is Google Photos. With Photos now able to make albums that include specific people or pets automatically and even add color to old black and white photos, it is clear that Google’s AI is already making quite the impact.
AI doesn’t just work on the headline-grabbing stuff like the features described above though. Much more basic features are taken care of by machine learning algorithms, too, and this latest innovation definitely falls into that category. It might not sound like the most exciting new feature on paper, but in practice, it will help you keep your Photos app tidy and much more presentable.
Google Photos will soon start making Crop and adjust suggestions for pictures of documents
Having a camera in our pockets all the time has changed our everyday behavior. Now, rather than noting basic information we see around us, most of us will just whip out our phones and snap a quick picture. This inevitably means that most (if not all) of us have random photos of scraps of paper interspersed between our everyday photos.
To help us tidy these up, Photos will start automatically suggesting these photos be edited in order to make them look better.
New! Crop documents in a single tap. Rolling out this week on Android, you may see suggestions to crop photos of documents to remove backgrounds and clean up the edges. pic.twitter.com/mGggRyb3By
— Google Photos (@googlephotos) March 28, 2019
In a tweet, Google described this new feature as a single-tap way of making these photos of documents look smarter. When the feature lands on your Android phone, a single tap will remove the background and tidy it up around the edges.
As well as removing the background, Photos will also open up a brand-new user interface designed specifically for documents. This will include the ability to rotate the document and switch the image to black and white should there be no color in the document.
All of the above happens automatically when Google Photos detects a picture of a document. There has been no word from Google so far, however, about whether or not the new document crop and adjust features can be activated manually. This may depend on how much faith Google has in its AI to recognize every single document we snap. Nothing is more frustrating than being unable to access a feature you need because your phone doesn’t know you need it and won’t give you the option to access it.
The new document editor features are rolling out to Google Photos now, so if you own an Android smartphone and use Google Photos, you should expect to see it on your phone soon.