Apple Is Trying to Do What Google Photos Already Does

Hmmm, a photo tool that uses face recognition, can be easily searched, and plots all your geotagged photos onto maps? Where have I heard all this before?

At today’s WWDC 2016, Apple announced a few Photos features that gave us a serious case of deja vu. That’s because Google Photos already does pretty much the exact same stuff, and with Google’s brain baked-in, it will be very hard for Apple to top it.

Here’s the part Apple proposed today that might be a bit more interesting. Using face recognition, Photos can determine that you’ve been documenting a particular event with particular group of people, and it will then organize them together into “Memories.”

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Then, Photos will make you a slideshow of that Memory, using all photos and videos from a particular time, and you can even add generic music that’s categorized “uplifting” or “epic.” Not saying that anyone is gonna use this, but it’s there.

Update: One thing that was mentioned later in the keynote, and as several commenters have discussed below, is that if you use these tools on Google Photos, you end up giving all your data to Google, whereas Apple can do these things while keeping all your data local. This is not surprising as this is part of Apple’s big push to promote products based on their privacy merits.