Vic Gundotra, senior vice president at Google, during a presentation at Google I/O earlier this year.
Google announced 18 new features for its social network on Tuesday, including clever tools for easy editing of photos and videos, during a morning press conference at the NWBLK gallery space in the Mission.
“At Google, we’re looking at doing nothing less than revolutionizing the field of photography,” said Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of social at the Mountain View search giant.
The highlight was “Auto Awesome Movies,” which automatically cuts video clips together into a single movie, complete with stabilized footage, color filters, music and transitions.
For still photography, Gundotra showed off new tools that allow users to merge multiple pictures of a person in different parts of the frame into a single image or an animated GIF. Other tools enable users to edit out people who strolled into a frame.
Google also continued to improve the ability to automatically enhance images, by adding vignette, bumping up saturation, lightening shadows, removing redeye and more.
In addition, the company has improved the ability to search for images with keyword queries through enhanced image recognition and a broader library of search terms, like beach, sunset, dog and others.
Gundotra kicked off the morning session with an update on usage of Google+. Active users now total 540 million, including 300 million for the core social experience, he said. (It’s still unclear how Google defines the term active, and some are skeptical of these figures.) Users are uploading 1.5 billion photos each week, Gundotra said.
Google rolled out additional features for Google+ Hangouts as well, including support for GIFs, texts and location sharing inside the service.
“You can have one place to manage all your communication,” Gundotra said.
