Google, Only Google!

More than a week ago, a friend sent me this photo which he said was posted on some social networking site and he asked me when and where I took it. 

There was no data in the photo and I could not tell when it was taken. I posted the pic on various social networking sites to see if people could identify the place but nobody knew where this was. Friends who don't understand the woes of a camera addict told me to simply look through my photo album. They just don't understand. If I am to just look through every single photo in my photo album for this month alone, I probably will take at least half an hour or even a whole hour to do so and even then, I might miss one or two pics.

For one thing, the watch I'm wearing in the pic doesn't look like a smart watch. That makes it harder. Since 2017 or so, I almost never wear a watch that isn't a smart watch. If I have to take a bet, I would say the photo predates 2017.

And then a brilliant thought occurred to me. Since about 2013 or so, most of my photos are uploaded on Google Photos. I know how Google Photos search engine works. For such a photo, you probably have to type 'balcony' for the search engine to pick up the most likely photos. 

The search churned out tons of photos that had nothing to do with a balcony or a railing but it made my job a lot easier. There were far fewer photos to look through. I was once chided by a friend for being totally devoid of any imagination when I posed for a pic. She said I always posed in exactly the same way. I cannot help thinking how right she was when I went through all my balcony photos. I always pose in the same way without the smallest spark of imagination.  

Here's a sample of the result of my search. I will post one 'balcony' pic for each year, working backwards from this year.  

2020

Not quite a balcony shot but what do you expect from AI? Almost the same pose except that there was no railing for me to rest my hands.

2019

Same pose!

2018

The same pose again.

2017

2016

It would have been exactly the same pose had I not held on to the bottle. 

2015

Not a balcony but Google's AI recognises the fence.

2014

2013

Other people in the photo have been cropped off. My pose is precisely the same. My friend who said I wasn't good at posing for a pic is standing to my right. It was her brilliant idea to have the flowers between us and the camera. I would never have thought of that in a million years. LOL

As you can see, after tracing the photos through Google Photos all the way back to 2013, I still could not locate the photo that my friend sent to me.  I thought of giving up completely. What if I overlooked the photo earlier or Google Photos didn't list it as a balcony photo? Before 2013, I didn't upload most of my photos in Google and you can imagine how hopelessly disorganised all my pre-2013 photos are.

It's really not that important if one cannot remember from a photograph when or where it was taken especially when one is a selfie addict. People who are not selfie addicts will find it strange; they probably can remember most photos that they have taken of themselves when these photos are shown to them. Many people I know in the Far East are selfie addicts. Some of them take more photos in a single day than I take in a month.

I did think of giving up the search but after going through many of these pics, I was quite intrigued what else Google Photos might churn out. I soon found on my Google a photo which looked a lot like the photo that was sent to me. Google gave the year as 2004, some 16 years ago. I then checked one of my hard disks and sure enough this pic that my friend sent to me was taken in June 2004, some 16 years ago. Looking through the hard disk, I discovered many more 'balcony' photos - all in exactly the same pose (my friend was right about me lacking imagination). Some of them were photos that were digitised from film photos and these will forever remain undated and undate-able. 

I was going to post them when I thought some of the photos from my hard disk looked like I might have been underage at the time of photography. Now, that's the weird thing about the world we live in when I hesitate to post a perfectly decent non-sexual pic of myself taken by me alone when I was much younger. Haha.

If you really want to keep your many photos properly organised, upload everything on Google Photos. The search engine in Google Photos is incredible. My entire life is on Google.