Google+ Update For iOS Brings Auto Awesomeness To Your Photos

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It would be hard to convey how little I care about Google+, but I’ll try:

Google what? Plus? What’s that? Never heard of it. And if I had heard of it, I would probably forget about it in less than a minute.

Pretty good, huh? Yet despite this I actually quite like the photos part of Google+, although until now I haven’t been interested enough to post many photos to it. But the newly-updated Google+ app for iOS has just launched and it has all th cool new photo features announced by Google at its dorky Google Glasses 1

If you have used the excellent Everpix, then much of Google+’s new features will be familiar. The app now (with your permission) uploads all pictures from your camera roll and stores them privately on Google’s servers, ready to share (or not). You can then browse them all by date or by “Highlights” which somehow pics out the best of your photos from the batch. Everpix has something similar, but it’s more effective, showing you just one of a batch of almost-identical photos for example, where Google+ shows you most of them.

The other neat photo feature is “Auto Awesome,” which will automatically process your pictures. If you shoot a sequence of the same subject with different exposures, they’ll be combined into an HDR shot. If those pictures are mostly the same but for a little movement, they’ll be stacked into aha amounts to an animated GIF (pronounced in my house with a hard “g.” Remember that if you visit. We also use the toilet sitting down, German-style.)

Google+ can also stitch panos from suitable pictures, and will even meld the best parts of a series of group shots so everyone is smiling. Creepy.

If nothing else, Google+ is a great way to backup your iOS photos to the cloud. I currently use Dropbox Camera Uploads, Google+, Everpix and Apple’s own Photo Stream. Plus I back up to iCloud and use SuperDuper on my Macs. Done and done.

The app is free, of course, and comes with a bunch of social crap too, but that’s easy enough to ignore: If this was called Google Photos, it would be pretty great.

Source: iTunes


  1. Yes, I know it’s called I/O, and that the glasses are called Glass. I just did it to annoy the Droidies (and apparently they prefer the term “Droiders.”) ↩

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