I spend a lot of time generating professional development content for teachers. One of the frustrating things about this commitment is that things change quickly and the more content you generate the more likely something will be inaccurate. I have long used Flickr as my suggestion for how teachers might make educational use of digital photography. One of the major advantages was the free cost of a sizeable storage account.
Today, I learned that my description of Flickr was no longer accurate. Google announced unlimited free storage. Not only was there no cost, but Google described a unique search feature allowing the location of old images based purely on descriptions. You could ask for images of “Paris” to see images from your 2004 trip or Cindy to find pictures of your wife (my wife). This just seemed too magical to believe so I decided to give it a try. I knew that I had taken a picture of a pair of geese and several goslings a couple of weeks ago so I thought I would see if Google could locate the picture.
Sure enough, Google found the photo. You have to admit this is pretty impressive. I searched for “goose” and I find my photo. The photo is labelled “babes in the weeds” so the system Google uses had to know these were Canadian Geese.
Google did return several other images and it does seem there are still some bugs to be addressed. All of the images were of birds – broadly defined. Among the images was the following.
This image did bring back memories. It is the statue of a chicken I think I took in Hawaii. So, Google evidently understands that a goose is a bird and can search for images containing “bird like” objects. Impressive.
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