A priori it is logical and understandable to think that Google Photos is a simple gallery, but nothing is further from the truth. The application developed by the American company offers all kinds of tools within it, either to edit the images or organize them more effectively, and over time the updates nourish this system with more functions.
A few years ago, specifically at Google I/O 2019, the Mountain View company announced a very interesting option for users, although we still have no news of its availability to users. This is more normal than it seems, since this type of instrument usually takes several years of development for proper operation.
We are talking about the function that transforms black and white photos into color photos . During the presentation they stated that a test version would arrive very soon, but three years later this feature remains a mystery. To such an extent that hardly anyone remembers this ad for Google Photos anymore.
Google Photos had a beta
Converting old black and white photos to color is a very interesting alternative for many users, since they can appreciate how it would really look back then. This function was called Colorize and for some time it was present in Google Photos, although only in a beta version.
Its operation does not hide any mystery and it is that it works with algorithms and object identification so that the AI is able to recognize the elements in the image and color according to its criteria. Of course, the results obtained do not have to correspond to reality, since it is a simple interpretation.
2/ Here’s a photo of my 104yo grandmother on her wedding day, colorized with Google Photos on my phone. (You can see we have some work to do; my grandfather didn’t wear pink pants to his wedding!) pic.twitter.com/Ni8v0Bz3vg
— David Lieb (@dflieb) May 6, 2019
You may not get the picture you want, as the examples we’ve seen over the years show too much cold or too hot . However, this is something that you can easily solve by editing the image with your mobile and reducing or increasing these parameters.
The Colorize function of Google Photos was integrated in version 4.26 of the application and today users are mostly enjoying version 6.3. However, it seems that the option does not remain active for all consumers and that it could be exclusive to the Google Pixel.
Photo Coloring Apps
In any case, there is no reason to worry about this issue since there are third-party applications that fulfill this task and that work quite well. One of the most striking proposals to supplement the Google Photos feature and turn black and white photos into color is Colorize Images .
This platform has more than a million downloads and a rating of 4.1 stars out of 5, so you can get a general idea that it offers a great service. The program also takes advantage of machine learning to colorize the photos and this means that the more photos it analyzes, the more effective it will be.
The best of all is that its operation is not complicated at all and you only have to select an image so that a button appears at the bottom . It is enough to press it so that the photo image instantly takes on color. To save it, use the options in the upper right area.
