Picture-perfect: Google Photos turns 5, Silicon Valley honchos say good things
Lieb commemorated the occasion by sending out a tweet on the 5th anniversary of the app.
by ET OnlineIn 2015, tech giant Google launched Google Photos, a photo-sharing and storage service and the rest, as they say, is history. Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, Google Photos has the ability of recognising photo content, automatically generating albums, animating similar photos to quick videos and more.
On the 5th anniversary of the photo-sharing app, David Lieb, the Product Lead at Google Photos, sent out a tweet commemorating the occasion. Lieb began the tweet by saying that he finds it hard to believe that Google Photos has turned 5 years old.
Describing the evolution of Google Photos, Lieb wrote, “what started as a simple photo management tool has become the home to more than 1B people's memories.”
Lieb further added that he couldn’t be more proud of this team and that there will be much more to build and improve on. Several tech moguls and startup investors also sent out tweets to congratulate Lieb on his achievement.
American entrepreneur and Houston-based web developer, Matt Mullenweg, also known as the founder of WordPress, responded to Lieb’s tweet and called Google Photos a ‘game changer’.
Startup investor Chris Sacca, who also participated in the show ‘Shark Tank’, called Google Photos an ‘indispensable’ product and felt the app had been around for longer than five years.
Casey Newton, The Verge’s primary source of Silicon Valley news, was all-praise for the 5-year-old app.
Austin Allred, the co-founder and CEO of Lambda School called the app an ‘incredible product.’
Google Photos allows users to easily upload photos as it comes with a drag-and-drop interface. It also does the occasional springcleaning as it clubs two or more duplicate pictures together, saving space and time.
Before uploading photos, you can choose if you wish to use ‘High Quality (free unlimited storage) or ‘Original’ in which all photos and videos are saved to your Google Drive which has limited storage.
Searching for images in Google Photos is easier than ever. All you have to do is search your photo with a keyword and get the photos corresponding to it. When you search ‘food’ all the images with food show up. Using the swipe and pinch gesture, you can easily navigate through your photograph as per the date and time.
Google Photos also allows users to edit their pictures with the help of simple yet powerful tools which help apply filters, choose colours and more. The app also allows making movies, collages, animations and more. .
After a glorious run of 5 years, it will be interesting to see what Google Photos has in store for the users.
Google Chrome, in all probability, might be the most commonly-used browser, but it has been at the centre of criticism due to controversial changes, security problems and data concerns.From Chrome 79 accidentally deleting data for Android users in December 2019, Chrome 80’s ‘high level vulnerabilities’ that put data at risk to the controversial deep linking upgrade in February 2020 that allegedly compromised on privacy, Chrome has often left its users worried about their safety and security.However, Chrome has now put all the privacy and security concerns to rest with its new upgrade. A blog post on Google’s website titled, ‘More intuitive privacy and security controls in Chrome’, breaks down the security updates in detail. Here are some of them:
Most of us use the incognito mode in Google Chrome for private browsing. The USP of Google’s incognito mode is that it does not save history, information entered by the user in forms or browser cookies. The good folks at Google have now decided to take security and privacy in incognito mode a notch higher.You can now control whether you wish to allow third-party cookies in incognito mode. Chrome will now block third-party cookies by default in incognito mode. If you wish to allow third-party cookies for specific sites, you can click the ‘eye’ sign on the address bar.The feature, as per Google’s blog, will be gradually rolled out. For the uninitiated, third-party cookies allow websites to track a user across the web. With Chrome’s new update, you can keep your information secure by blocking these cookies.
Security attacks such as phishing and malware have become quite common on the internet. To combat the menace, Google Chrome now has a security update that users can opt for. Called ‘Enhanced Safe Browsing’, this security upgrade will allow Chrome to proactively detect phishing attacks, malware and other web based threats.Chrome will do this by proactively checking if pages and downloads are dangerous by sending information about them to Google Safe Browsing.Going forward, Google will also add more protections to this upgrade such as tailored warnings for phishing sites, file downloads, cross product alerts and more.
Another security upgrade that Chrome has come up to protect your privacy is ‘Secure DNS’. When we enter a website in the address bar of the browser, it first needs to determine which server is hosting the website. This step is called DNS (Domain Name System) lookup.Google Chrome’s Secure DNS feature will encrypt this step using ‘DNS-over-HTTPS’. This will not allow the attackers to find out which website you want to visit and they won’t be able to send you phishing webpages.
Apart from introducing strong security measures to keep attackers at bay, Google has also developed a safety net for its users. With the help of a safety check in Chrome, you can make sure that your data is safe.For starters, Chrome has come up with a new tool that will tell you if the passwords that you have asked Chrome to remember have been compromised and if so, how to fix it.Secondly, Chrome will raise a red flag if ‘Safe Browsing’, Google’s technology to warn you when you are about to access a dangerous website, has been turned off.The safety check tool will also help you determine if you are using the latest version of Google Chrome. It will also let you know if malicious extensions have been installed and how to remove them.