"Similar Shots"
My Google Photos account has maybe 20 years of my photography in it. Its "similar photos" feature will sometimes surface pictures which I've taken across the years which are "similar" to one another.
Whatever dumb fucking computer vision feature is secretly tagging all my photos with subject matter data, it does NOT check whether the thing it's identifying is significant or important.
Here, it's identifying photos of extremely yellow soups (turmeric or cream of chicken soups and curries, I expect) that I've cooked over the years.
Isn't that stupid? It seems to do this one time every day, and I ignore it all the time because it's always extremely fucking stupid. It has never induced me to spend money on Google Photos printed materials. I scorn all the engineering hours that went into this feature, and I hope the people who engineered it are taking joy in their families... because they should not be taking joy in this work!
Here's another example: Google identified two different times I saw dumb shit written on a tree. One says "TREE" on the tree. The other says "UR MOM".
The main goal of this feature is clearly the printed material upsell on the screen below the image collage: "Print this memory," either in book form starting at $15 USD, or on a *canvas* starting at $25 USD. Here is Google Photos attempting to sell me books and canvases with my completely nasty and pointless photos of yellow soups on dirty stoves and countertops:
Surely, if Google is going to secretly tag all my photos with metadata and then use it to identify themes, it would assess those themes to see if they are significant? I guess not.
One thing that makes me feel particularly bonkers in situations like this is how much time and energy and compute power is being spent on rolling the worst possible dice rolls of all time. Tag everything and surface an utterly random photo theme once a day - maybe you'll get lucky and hit upon the one lucky thing that would make someone buy a printed canvas. How many people per million do you need try this with in order to pay for this feature? I have no idea. Does it pay for itself at all?
Does it need to? I assume this material is more useful as a source of training data, anyway. It's utterly frustrating. But I have only so many hours in my day, and right now I'm not using those hours to build photo fileservers with nice web interfaces or whatever. So if I want to easily share my photos to the people in my family who are reliant on features like web album pages, then I'm gonna be using this service.
Maybe one day I will break away! But for now I'm just going to seethe about the soup nonsense. This is not healthy... but it is funny.