It can take months, even years, for me to share photos from a trip. The more shots I take, the more I dread going through them to delete bad shots and perform tweaks such as brightening dark shots.
So I was intrigued when Google promised to automate much of this photo editing as part of enhancements to its Google+ social network.
You simply upload a batch of photos and Google will try to highlight the best ones and make them look their best. As a bonus, Google will turn a series of successive snapshots into an animation and stitch overlapping photos into a panoramic image. The original images are preserved, but hidden away.
I started my test by manually going through 270 photos taken during a spring weekend trip to Providence. I kept and tweaked 107 of them, mostly by cropping out distractions and adjusting brightness and contrast. I then chose 38 of the best to include in a photo album.
After that, I uploaded all 270 of the originals to see if Google would make the same creative choices I had. To try out other aspects of Google's tools, I also added a selection of shots from trips over the past year to Baltimore and Thailand and photos of Space Shuttle Enterprise's final journey last year atop a modified Boeing 747.
Google did a decent job for a virtual photo editor, but I'm not ready to cede creative control quite yet. It brightened shots of Edgar Allan Poe's gravesite, which I had purposely shot dark to appear more eerie. More importantly, the automated tools don't include cropping.
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