Google+ Stories
So, what's going on with these Google+ Stories?  I'm assuming other people have had them pop up on their Google+ accounts?

It appears that Google's computers (I'm assuming this is a computer algorithm and not an actual person) are going through all the pictures I have stored on Google to create what they call ''Stories'', which are rearrangements of the photos into a type of sliding picture show .

This is the kind of thing that would make many privacy advocates go nuts.
But me?  I have to admit, I'm a bit of a sucker for these kind of things.  I love my old photographs.  (They're admittedly probably only of interest to me, but they are of interest to me.)  And I like it when Google tries to do something new and flashy with them to catch my attention.  I didn't ask for Google to go through my old photographs and create stories, but I thought it was kind of cool when they did.

It appears that the computer algorithms are going through my old photos to make their best guesses at what the photos are, and where they belong.  They're surprisingly accurate at which photos go together.
Google+ does give me the option, of course, to edit their computer generated titles and dates to make them more accurate, and even to replace the pictures with better ones of my own preference.  But for the moment I'm finding it more interesting to just leave the computer's guesses on as is.
The first story they put together is called Wednesday evening in Nichinan [LINK HERE].
The photos are all from my Trip to Miyazaki blog post here.
Google+ did an amazing job of figuring out just what pictures were part of that trip, and which weren't.  Perhaps because they were all under the same blog post?
But it gets better.  Google+ also knew exactly which photos from that post were from the town of Nichinan (and not from Miyazaki in general).  Even more amazing, I never mentioned the town of Nichinan by name at all in that post.  I just refereed to it by the name of the Shrine--Udo Shrine.  (They must have technology which matches the photos to visual information stored in their database, right?)
And the date is surprisingly accurate as well.  October 4, 2007, Wednesday evening.  2 Days
It was afternoon, actually, but everything else was spot on.
The post date from the blog post these photos came from was Monday, October 8, 2007, but if you read the post carefully, you'll see it actually took place on the Wednesday before, and that we didn't get down to the Shrine until the day was mostly over.  And the entire trip (but not just the Nichinan Shrine part) lasted 2 days.
Wait a minute! That's eerily accurate!  Did a computer really do all this? Or was an actual person going through my posts and compiling the photos into these ''stories''?

The other album, Monday Night in Malaysia [LINK HERE] takes several of my photos from a trip to Malaysia.
This time around, the computer generated date was way off: January 1, 1980.  And the photos weren't actually taken on a Monday night.  But the computer algorithm did correctly identify which pictures were from Malaysia, and which ones weren't.  All the photos in that album were indeed taken in Malaysia.

Oh well--Win some lose some Google+ algorithms.