Photos and albums
Last night, I was on my way to bed at a somewhat-reasonable-for-me hour when I noticed that the Google Photos app had generated a “best of 2017” album and was offering to turn it into a printed photo book for me.
Intrigued, I took a look and found that it had also generated several other smaller albums for me, none of which I thought did a very good job of matching the criteria it had chosen. (“Best of Fall 2017” and such.) But when I looked at the best-of-the-whole-year collection, I thought it had done a pretty good job of collecting about 50 good photos of people and places I wanted to remember from 2017.
It did include a few that I didn’t like, though, and left out a few that I remembered and wanted to include, so I started looking through all of my photos from 2017 to see which ones I would include in a best-of-2017 collection. By the time I finished with that, I had 100 photos in the list (the maximum that Google Photos allows in an album), but it was nearly an hour past the latest time I usually go to bed.
Woke up this morning after only about five hours’ sleep (not enough for me), but wasn’t sleepy, so I did some culling from that collection. Ended up with a set of about 80 that I’m pretty happy with, both as photos and as a sort of overview of my year. Except:
- Apparently I usually don’t take photos of people except when I’m traveling. So I don’t have any photos from 2017 of local people—not even Kam. :( [Edited later to add: I guess I do take photos of local people at parties and other group events. And it turns out I have one of Kam in a group photo from when we went to see Hamilton. But I don’t have many just ordinary day-to-day photos of local people.]
- I also mostly only have photos of people I actually saw, so there are lots of far-flung friends who I interacted with at least occasionally by phone or online, but who I don’t have photos of.
So … it’s a good overview of 2017, except in the ways in which it’s not. But I think I’ll order the printed album anyway, to see how I like it.
Side note: While I was poking around in Google Photos, I got curious about its finding-things-without-needing-manual-labeling feature, and I did a search for [birds]. On the one hand, it found not only photos of real egrets and mallards and seagulls and chickens and such, but also photos of my stuffed-animal birds: penguin, owl, ostrich, raven, etc. On the other hand, it also misidentified several other photos as birds: a dog; a child in a winter coat with a fake-fur-trimmed hood; and one of my stuffed-animal llamas. (A followup search for [llamas] brought up another stuffed-animal llama, several alpacas, some camels, a dog, and a cassowary.)