Google I/O brought with it a lot of exciting updates for Google+, not the least of which were a slew of automatic improvements to Google+ Photos including Auto Highlight, Auto Enhance and Auto Awesome. But the updates didn’t stop when I/O ended last Friday.

Today, Google’s Search blog announced that the company has started implementing some impressive technology that will allow you to search for your photos based on what they contain visually, even if there’s not a tag in sight. Read more…

Back in early December, Google announced that the company would be adding 5,000 new stock images of “nature, weather, animals, sports, food, education, technology, music and 8 other categories” for free use in Docs, Sheets and Slides.

At the time nobody knew how Google got these images, who took them, or what kind of license they came with. The mystery continued on unsolved until a week ago when an iStocker discovered one of his own images in the search results. As it turns out, the use of these photos is the result of a little known licensing deal between Google and Getty Images. Read more…

ABC Denver is very apologetic today after learning a hard (and embarrassing) lesson on why you need to be extra careful when sourcing photos from the web. On Monday, the 7NEWS station aired a segment on ex-CIA director David Petraeus and his affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell. When mentioning Bradwells new book, titled “All In,” the station put up a book cover with a lewd title that read, “All Up In My S**tch.”
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The Image Language is a simple web app that lets you “write with images”. Feed it a chunk of text, and it turns each words into the top image result on Google Images. The image above shows what this paragraph looks like when fed through the system.

The Image Language (via Laughing Squid)

Src Img is an uber-simple bookmarklet created by Jarred Bishop and Hayden Hunter that lets you quickly do a Google Image search for any online photograph with just two clicks. It’s a simple link (i.e. bookmarklet) that you drag into the bookmarks bar of your browser. Whenever you want to search Google Images for a particular photograph, simply click the bookmarklet. It’ll overlay all the photos on the page with a “?¿” square. Click this to search for that photo. Voila!

Src Img (via dvafoto)

Google has added EXIF data to Google Images, allowing you to quickly look up details on how a particular photograph was taken (as long as the data is embedded). Simply click any of your search results to see the details in the panel on the right. They don’t seem to be doing anything with geotag info — displaying where the photo was taken on a Google Map, for example — which is probably a smart choice. Something tells me a lot of people would have a problem with that, even though the data is publicly accessible and baked into the photo itself.

(via Google Operating System)

Thanks for the tip, Hannah!

I came across an interesting post over at The Guardian a while back that discussed whether Google’s ranking algorithms are good at gauging art, and whether the top result for an artist accurately reflects the artist’s “best work”.

I decided to do the same experiment with famous historical photographers. The following images are the top results when typing the photographers’ names into Google’s image search:

Berenice Abbott

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