Google+ ramps up photography features

Google has announced a slew of updates for its Google+ social network at the “A morning with Google+” event. In a move to make its service friendly for photographers, Google is adding features like full-size image backup for iOS, better Highlight capabilities and more.

Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering at Google took to the stage to announce these updates and how they are set to help photo-related issues. For one, Google+ for iOS is soon to get full-size backup and background sync in order to make life easier for users who wish to upload pictures, without compromising in quality.

HDR images with Snapseed

In an interesting move, Google has made object recognition within images official. Say, if you wish to search for images from your trip to Kashmir last year on Google+, you can type in snow or houseboat in the search term to have the service only show you images in which these objects are present.

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There’s also the Auto Enhance mode that improves each picture you add to Google+. You will be able to tweak the enhancements and if you’ve been editing your images before uploading them, you can exempt entire albums from this feature. It is a great tool to have nevertheless. If you like to edit your images on the fly, Snapseed has a new HDR Scape filter that with a single tap will be able to create HDR images. Google has also added the Analog Efex Pro effect to Nik Collection with which you can “reimagine” your images using classic cameras and processing methods. The Collection still costs $149.

Take a series of pictures…

…and erase the noise

Auto Awesome, a tool you could use to create GIFs from a series of images has also been fit with new features. The Action technique will help you create a strobe-effect photograph of images that involve action. The Eraser tool will help you get rid of people and objects from your series of images to give you a cleaner image, focused just on the subject. There’s also a technique called Movie which produces highlight reels from your photos and videos, complete with effects, transitions and a soundtrack, by itself. You can also customise the Movie once its done.

All these enhancements will be available this week, says Google. Although Auto Awesome will work on certain devices with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean and up, other app features will be widely supported. Google also announced that 540 million people are active across Google each month and 300 million people active in just the stream. More than 1.5 billion photos are also uploaded each week on Google+, which is quite an impressive number.