I got one of those promotional emails from Google Workspace recently, pushing "Ask Gemini in Drive." Their pitch: get synthesized answers pulled from multiple files, no need to actually find and read them yourself.
Sounds convenient. But here's the thing I believe strongly in this age of AI slop and post truth internet you must always check your sources.
If there's a conspiracy or cartel among tech giants, it works in two parts.
First, they're slowly weaning us off our own capabilities. Our own PCs, our own software, our own data, our own creative work. Everything gets pushed toward a thin client model where it all lives in the cloud. Their cloud. Their software. Your data, despite endless assurances it stays private (except for training purposes, except for testing, and so on, have you actually read the updated terms of service lately). That means they control everything. Sound familiar? Too much like Orwell's Big Brother?
Second, while some features stay free for now, it quickly becomes clear you'll need to subscribe, and not just to one service either. The real hidden cost will be cloud storage, and eventually being locked out of what's actually yours. I'm not exaggerating. OneDrive has already started doing this, and not just to me.
So we'll be handed answers without needing to think, but we could pay dearly for the privilege.
This is an AI image I created with the prompt above, using google Deep Mind’s latest incarnation of its generative app Imogen-3. it really looks better than most other generative AI. Less overcrowding with intricate but less relevant detail, with consistent lighting and better capturing the emotional direction of my prompt. It was also my only creation with this prompt.
Google claims
"We’ve significantly improved Imagen 3’s ability to understand prompts, which helps the models generate a wide range of visual styles and capture small details from longer prompts.
To be even more useful, Imagen 3 will be available in multiple versions, each optimized for different types of tasks, from generating quick sketches to high-resolution images."
Ok that’s nice wording google but what does it mean and why do I see such a difference to other prompt generated images
Well perhaps there is a hint right at the end of their hype.
"Imagen 3 was built with our latest safety and responsibility innovations, from data and model development to production.
We used extensive filtering and data labeling to minimize harmful content in datasets and reduced the likelihood of harmful outputs. We also conducted red teaming and evaluations on topics including fairness, bias and content safety.”
Recent developments in AI technology have raised some intriguing questions about data handling, promoting fake news and bias. It appears that at least google is implementing input checking mechanisms on the information they use to train their models. This likely extends to assessing image quality as well, ensuring that the data fed into these systems meets certain standards. Looks “good enough”.
However, this observation leads to a more pressing personal concern:
Does responsible AI development truly encompass ethical practices across the board? The issue of data collection methods remains a significant point of contention. Are these companies indiscriminately scraping data from various sources without proper consent or consideration?
This brings me to a personal worry many of us share: the privacy of our own data, particularly our photos. With the prevalence of cloud-based photo storage services like Google Photos, and the vast number of images captured and uploaded from mobile devices daily, it's natural to wonder about the security and usage of this data. I worry some companies are "hoovering up" these personal images en masse? If so, what are the implications for our privacy and the control we have over our own digital footprint?
As consumers and digital citizens, it's important that we stay informed about these practices and advocate for ethical standards in AI development. The balance between technological advancement and personal privacy is delicate, and it's a conversation we need to keep having as AI continues to evolve and integrate into our daily lives.
Has anyone else discovered a sudden massive increase in the number of views being recorded on Blogger (this site)? I was rather pleased with myself struggling to over half a million views over the past 20 years. Yes I have been using Blogger for 20 years! However, in the past month the pageviews have risen by over 100,000. Over the past week the recorded pageviews are between 2,000 & 3,500 per day. but actual pageviews, even most recent posts, seldom exceed 10 views per day.
I do suspect bad actors, possible spambots, content scrapers or maybe a hacking attempt gone wrong. I really can not see what might be achieved by such an activity, perhaps other than wasting bandwidth (which I can not see evidence of). Is it part of giving a legitimate address for a phishing scam to fool validity checks?
Ok now I have noticed. Do I try to inform Google? Yes, but I have gotten nowhere again. Have you ever tried to contact good with a problem? y=You will know what I'm talking about. Is is another massive "I don't care" / #FAIL google!
So what can I find out about these extra views (which I might just call an attack). Well it must be automated to reach that number. Its seems to be totally originating from Hong Kong, using apple MacIntosh and Chrome, the refereeing URL being reported as other by Google Analytics. The biggest puzzle is my blogger site is recording these extra views but my actual page view seem to be remaining normally low. Are these numbers even real? Should I be concerned, given the location these pageviews seem to be originating?
"Google recognizes posts created from ChatGPT and downgrades them in search"
I've seen similar comments on several Instagram reels (I'd never followed them by the way they were pushed at me), google news, youtube and a couple of blog posts. Sounds like a bit of viral hype/myth to me but thought I would check my blog stats.
Well isn't that a coincidence?
I still doubt that things are moving that fast, and are so competitive. Maybe they are. There does seem to be a race to claim technical dominance of the ChatAI and AIart fields. Also I'm not sure I yet trust OpenAI to be driving the developments, there are the issues of secrecy, open letters by many important people and experts to have a pause in building of bigger models and not forgetting the whole issue of the ethics of scraping the uncensored net for data. Finally, it is logical that having the training of these deep networks based on these unverified sources include all the bias and unfettered untruths that are increasing within the unrestricted websites and social media, with many of those publishing "content" hiding behind anonymity, What should we expect?
Personally, I'm not thrilled that Google might be one potentially trying to dominate yet another field/service that so many people are flocking towards. Google has an extensive history of introducing new things and then killing them, They prefer to call it deprecation.
Anyway I'm suspicious it might be true and I rather let those interested find my thoughts rather than have to get through an unnecessary layer of possible google "censorship". So no more blog posts written (or even reviewed) by ChatGPT. I'll still be investigating how artists and photographers might use and be affected by this technology.
So, if you are interested in my opinion please stick around.
Putting all your eggs in one basket that is controlled by one of the big social media suppliers may be very cheap but it is a very risky strategy.
I am getting so frustrated by all the “little” changes in anything
social media or “free” internet services (are you listening Facebook & Google,
ah didn’t think you were). Failed updates to the operating systems (are you
listening Microsoft) don’t help. Things like changes to passwords or enhanced “security”
(aka for the service not us), buttons and functions that once worked having disappeared
or just hanging. Trying to build a
coherent structure across any of these services is at risk of instant and unannounced
disruption and disappearance. It is going to frustrate your loyal viewers trying to find you, as much as you.
It is the uploading and sharing of photos/images that most
annoys me (and blogger/google photos is not without blame here). The quality of
the actual displays on most services is not good, Compression down to the lower
resolution screens at the display time is generally not great (presumably to
reduce bandwidth and lag time). Flickr may be an exception here. Also it is not
uncommon for images to get “lost” in the flood. Algorithmic selection on these
services favours the “celebrity” and more of the same, not the original and quality and especially not the creative. So even your friends may be lucky to see your posts if you haven’t
made the algorithms target views or likes in the first short time period.
Is there a solution? Maybe, we can stop using social media
and the “free” services, as the place we base our net presence, because we are
not in control of what they choose to show and do. However, if we want to use
the Internet to reach a wider audience we can still participate but we need
to build a few things on the net but on our own “properties”. They should be at
least an email account (not a social media controlled undercover agent or their chat features that seem not be always listening in), probably also our own website (there are many companies that offer reasonable cost options)
and domain name. These are stable places you can bring people to with confidence. Somr free or inexpensive services like email newsletters, portfolios and blogs can then be interfaced to spaces that you own and control, not total control by them (read the TOS terms of service). Once these are
established you can use suitable social media to bring friends and interested
folk back to your presence, with suitable links back to your own places.
So make sure you are not building on borrowed time or rented ground. Stop chasing traffic, the distracted rabble chasing fame or celebrity on social media, they are just glimpsing works anyway as they scroll past.
Watch this space for my attempts to put this common sense
logic into practice.
I’ve left to last, writing about aspects that I believe Ai
techniques should be applied for photo editing and management in the future. The
movement to apply different Ai based refinements into existing tools (eg
masking, blending etc) will definitely continue. What I would love is to be able
to train my own AI with my style of processing images and being able to supervise
a more automatic “workflow” to suit both the photograph's content and my
objectives.
Ted Forbes of the YouTube channel “The Art of Photography”
has reviewed a new AI based photo editing offering called Imagen AI
This does sound a lot like something I have been looking for, a service that will automatically create edits for you using your styles (or generic “talent profiles”). At present, it appears very much aimed at bulk usage cases like event and wedding photographers and specifically from Lightroom. I hope the methods can be taken further, expanded to be more general and interfaced with other software/starting points.
So this is interesting, but not immediately helpful for me (whilst I do have an old version of Lightroom still but never use it) and I’m not holding my breath that it might become the next big thing.
Google have now also released its own text-to-image service also called Imagen, It's a competator for other similar AIart and whilst appropriate prompting can elicite photo-realistic images it's unlikey to be interest to or useful for most photographers.
I am late discovering this experimental tool from google labs, called autodraw.com. It dates back to mid 2017 and uses the same technology to guess an object as google's quickdraw. Only this time it lets you sketch out the object you want and "It pairs machine learning with drawings from talented artists to help everyone create anything visual, fast."
Its as simple as that. The graphics are good (created by graphic artists), with Creative Commons Licensing, so free for non-commercial use, easy to download and use. Its also a bit of fun although you may find it quickly reaches its limits of what it might recognize.
One holy grail in the AI applications in Photography (or any
visual art) has been the potential ability to automatically see into the binary
files (that are photographic images) and use that in searches. For a decade or so google has claimed a lot of progress, starting with the really useful
ability to find cats in photos. Ok I’m being a cynical but I have been tracking the claims in google photos, auto labeling things and places. It can look through the great dumps of photos its
backup & sync tools is daily uploading. Are things improving? You can enter
a term and be “surprised” (on the first couple of occasions) that it will find
some photo you have forgotten about. It does also pull up a few clearly bad
matches. What I have noticed is the really obvious things google misses in many selections. So I’m really
not seeing any significant improvement.
For a while at least flickr had a feature that would add tags at the time you uploaded your photo. If you bothered to check you were able to delete incorrect terms of add your own. This seem a better approach to me but alas it seems to have fallen by the way side now.
Moving forward I’ve now trying out a slightly new
alternative Excire (it has been around as a plug-in for lightroom as Excire Search
for a while) which primarily groups and classifies your images to create a hierarchical
set of keywords. It can then write these keywords to sidecar files, which will
then allow this information to percolate into any other software that reads
this format. I’m only using the trial version which unfortunately doesn’t give
me the ability to write these files, so I have check it yet. Its classification
strikes me as both friendlier to use and possibly better than either of the
above.
It also have the benefit that you see the grouping visually
and they are laid out from best match at the top to just possible at the bottom.
Further you don’t have to change modes (eg. go to new screen to make
corrections). You just select the image click on it and you can make changes to
the keywords on the left tab or albums on the right.
It strikes me as perfect to be run as you first
upload/ingest your photos. Helping you to rank and cull but giving the
incentive to better keywording of your images. I already have photo mechanic
(no AI features as yet) which I love and use (but not so much for keywording).
So I’m Impressed but not ready to jump ship just yet, for keyword Shangri-la. However that time is much getting closer.
Whilst I was once a fan of most things google, these days not so much. Perhaps not totally against it yet, I still use it as the simplest way to include images here in blogger and very occasionally as a way to share a photo.
The Backup & Sync, the little application that google will supply for you computer or phone acts like a vacuum cleaner it such up everything usually before you have had a chance to review them. There are not curatorial tools to help you cull the duds and less than mediocre. So whilst the Ai based image content search are often impressive they are still prone to the common pitfall of any Ai based system, they get used to the garbage and will not reliably find everything that you are looking for. You will see some nice results, and see some clearly wrong results; but you will never know about the gems you missed.
Its a bit spooky, This is really a personal observation. Google is collecting so much about you that even though they claim they protect your privacy they are building incredibly detailed profiles of you and your everyday activities, justified that they will be creating target ads, buy supplying their advertisers with aggregated profiles. There is a specific claim in google photos at the moment that they don't use your photos to target adds. However if you really want to scare yourself take a look at your timeline that is being created in google maps. For sure there will be where you live and work, where your kids go to school ... it is scary when you realize what is available. Whilst it is seldom your photos google also gets other information from Gmail, your phones location data, your google searches and chrome browser. Google does also offer tools to manage which data is collected, but I'm sure you never realized just how much is being collected and aggregated specially on you in the normal working with a google account and their "free" tools.
The simple answer is YES, but there are reasons and not right away.
One thing that peeked my interest amongst the forthcoming changes to google photos (google drive & gmail) was not that they are intending to charge for storage (which is what a lot of current hype is about) it was a paragraphs in their November explanation of the changes. Gmail, Google photos and other google tools are being combined into s sinle google Drive Limit of 15 GB (for free) and after that storage will be charged.
When you have been over your storage quota for 2 years, your content in Gmail, Google Drive (including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and Jamboard files) and Google Photos may be deleted.
Another section make the same claim about inactive gmail accounts!
There is not mention of any warnings, just they now have the right to choose to start deleting inactive accounts and services, presumably without notice. Clearly its aim is to clean up storage once users are dead, or thy choose to stop using the services (including forgetting their password, etc). Which seems perfectly reasonable
The downside here is for your digital immortality (or not). Do you expect your personal data in the cloud to be accessible after you are dead?
Probably in most cases you might be glad this is the case, all those embarrassing photos to vanish. However there can easily be situations with family photos (which tend to become precious over time) need to be preserved. Its probably time to think about putting those important photos that form family memories into a separate album that gets share amongst your family members and encourage them to keep copies.
No need to panic this policy will only be started on June 1st this year. The 2 years of in activity probably begin then.
I don't think this is a google #FAIL, I just think they hopt it will get through without much fussy (compared with charging for photo storage after claiming it was the perfect place to store all your family photos - did they actually say for free?)
I had been noticing for a while that it was just too co0incidental I would search for say a toner cartridge and then the same ads would be dished up on youtube, other searches, in Gmail. Instagram and Facebook for days/ Was someone spying on me listening in on everything I do, well yes. However, all the scrapping of every little bit of metadata is being justified on the grounds that it helps you see better content! I think that should be rephrased puts you in a bubble so you only see some of what you like and more significantly lifts the advertising revenue of those serving you the content (they most don't pay for).
So I have done a little research and just made two changes. I most often now used the search engine Duck Duck Go and also mostly (but not always because I do still use a few google tools) I have started using the browser Brave. The change to both was painless. Ok the top third of the page of the Duck Duck Go queries are not filled with paid adds and Brave seems a bit faster and streamlined, Also pretty well all those co-incidental bombardments of the same ads has virtually stopped. A little investigation in Brave gave me a good idea way.
By the way, these stats are just after a couple of hour on an average day.
Well it look like there is a lot more sharing (or piracy) of the thing left on out computer caches by some browser and social media services, than they want to admit too. I don't miss these creepy things.
I was just getting ready to resume blogging. Everything about my camera obscura post was nicely formatted and ready in Open Live Writer (a much better place to set up your blog post than google/bogger’s pedestrian offering. As I put my toe in the water and clicked on the <Publish> button I got hit with an undecipherable error.
I had seen this before too many times. It will be that I am not able to upload the images to google photos as part of the publish task. The real underlying cause will thus be something google has done to their google photos system, perhaps its API, perhaps an album size limit or some new upload authorization step. Unfortunately It will be left to the voluntary developers on the Open Live Writer source project to find and fix the issue while google tries to divert any responsibility. Am I being too cynical? Heck no!
If you're having trouble posting photos to Google Blogger with @OpenLiveWriter, we have a test build with a fix. We'd appreciate it if you can test and let us know if it's working for you. https://t.co/oVOz9h3UmF
This fix seems to trigger a repeated opening of open live writer for me, so I’ll let the investigation and fixes continue. All the previous work arounds don’t work this time but I found my own, by firstly uploading the image to the web and inserting a web shared image rather than having it uploaded. Bit frustrating and fiddly but it works
I got one of those annoying messages/notifications over the top my chrome browser this morning, but it struck a nerve because I had been looking at the mess that confronts me in google photos (ok not everywhere the older stuff I uploaded from picasa in albums s still there and nicely organized). Glear the clutter, so google is acknowledging it! Thus I clicked on the link and guess what he assistant only wants to clear documents and screen captures BUT they were block post I don’t want them archive (whatever that means because I could find anything to explain what such an archive was?). I’m getting more convinced that google’s “I’m feeling lucky” approach has morphed into “trust us with your precious data, photos, … life” we know better (aka we can play with anonymous AI and algorithms with all that is yours just share more…) Maybe that's a bit dramatic but google, and specifically google photos have totally lost my trust.
Ok I’ll go to back picasa and just upload selected photos or albums like I used to. Hang on I can’t upload, download or even email from picasa anymore. Basically I cannot successfully log into to my google account either within picasa or gmail running under picasa. That really sucks. I can’t find anything on-line other than a lot of complaints and the misguided recommendation to use google photos BUT there is actually no off-line to way to use google photos, its only browser or smart phone based. Its reluctantly back to the vacuum cleaner idea and upload everything to the cloud.
Then to really annoy me, I got the popup to updated my backup and sync. Hmm its not working properly anyway perhaps I need to do that. Well guess what!!! … it wouldn’t update. Technical foul play google your disqualified from the game.
Over the years google has bought onto the internet a number of great software tools. I have and still use many of them, Blogger, picasa, gmail, My Tracks, Google Earth, Maps, Google Drive (Google Docs, Slides & Sheets), Nik Software, Snapseed). I’ve gone right off google photos (but still put up with it to publish photos into this blog). A number of these have been depricated and whilst they still work google no longer offers downloads, or alternative software and/or no support. The one thing they have been good with to date is giving warning and letting you download any personal data.
I have taken I liking to the idea of exploring that place between art and a photograph, in particular what I have been Hashtagging #AIart (on Instagram). Google created the Deep Dream generator originally as a way to explain how their image analysis technique worked. It is based on training neural networks (a type of artificially intelligent data miners). As well as recognizing objects, animals, people & things the networks can also be used to seek out style (ok in a rudimentary way, it can mimic marks making, line works, colour palette and several other features that make artworks original. The software does not create original art but it can take a photo and find that style of linework & colour etc within a photos. Some of the result are amazing. Unfortunately more and more examples that I see produced by other “copy cat” system are degenerating into the garish and boring, as they become very popular of social media.
Clearly google are looking to muscle in of the social media aspect and they have add a multilevel aspect to site membership (its free) and that is tied to number of public post and more importantly number of likes. A different levels you can only generate a specific number of a specific type/style of image with a set time frame. So It only took me a couple of images to reach my limit with a polite come back and try again later. The type of thing that just plain kills exploration and creativity. The writing is on the wall google this is going to become a ghost town like google+
The one nice thing, is the UI (user interface has been smarted up a bit with better layout of selection buttons and other tools. Nothing new just a little bit cleaner to look at.
One new feature, that I have asked for a few times, is better documentation of what was set up to produce each result. It seems quiet common that most people (especially those new to deep dream) blanket bomb one image with many alternative networks/styles, and after doing several and waiting a decent time for each it is difficult to remember how you created a particular masterpiece. The ? Intro item now gives you a run down although it has only remembered a few of my style images.
Perhaps its another case of needing more likes?
No matter, such is life.
So Why am I complaining, the software tools are free?
I thought I would give google photos another chance (probably it's third) it seemed pretty harmless. While I can see it is attempting to make sense of the mess. It just keeps making the mess bigger. At least the photo it autoloads it makes private, right, until you share them, right. Actually wrong all it does is use a 40 character code to make the photo link difficult to guess, this includes all the old photo from Picasa Web Album that you thought where safely private and only shared via a password.
Effectively there is a massive jungle of photos out there and your photos are sitting there in the wild.
It is easy to test out (access a photo in google photos) there will be a long url name to access it (the name is a web link not a jpeg address by the way. Paste that into a file you write to a usb. Take the usb to a foreign computer you have not use and cut and then paste the url in a browser you have not used so It will not know your google ID. There is your photo! Other have noticed this issue.
This is a really big deal, A significant betrayal of my trust.
Whilst I intend to keep using google photos for my shared photos and images (mainly for my blog). I have already turned google photos off on my phone and I'm working through deleting a lot of photo from my google photos account.
Unfortunately google is abandoning yet another photo product popular with users. Effective immediately they have formally notified that they no plans to updated (and support) the Nik software collection.
If you are a keen photographer, take RAW format photos and already have photoshop or lightroom, but don’t have the Nik software plug-ins yet, don’t delay download them now, they are free. They are popular because they are good.
I, like petapixel, once hoped that google supposedly an open source advocate, might make picasa, snap seed and the Nik tools open source and let keen users and photographers expand them. My cynical side feels google are squandering a lot of good photographic tools and abandoning the desktop/laptop/webapps space altogether to concentrate on capturing the mobile phone look-at-me-too eye’s (or their phone photo substitutes for seeing).
Against my better judgement, I left google photo on my new android phone, It immediately insinuated itself into my photos uploading everything (yes I have checked the only upload photo on WiFi connection option). I then just ignore it. Well it did keep updating itself and occasionally asking if it could vacuum up (it uses the term backup) any images saved it new folders on the phone. I got one or two excited notification that the assistant had made a very lame slide show it called a movie or had enhanced one of my images (made it black and white). So I figure its mostly harmless and just keep saying no.
At their recent I/O conference, supposedly for developers, Google announced an upgrade to google photos, included improved sharing, a photobook printing service and a new feature to come called Google lens (a turbo AI charged version of google goggles that will start adding details of what you photographed to you photo’s presumably captions or metadata (read that as where to buy it)
This is google’s mobile phone oriented hype (promotional clip) to make sharing look great, and not something more akin to skynet. I’m not thinking it is so intentionally sinister, its more just a feeble “Emperor's New Clothes” metaphor/slight of hand trick to open up and share even more of you private life with a colossal secretive corporation, who make there money selling such stuff to advertisers (oh yes and the NSA and perhaps others also vacuum it up as well.)
Well there are legitimate reason to want to share photos, firstly publically, so as for a blog post or privately just for the eyes of family and friends. I still use google photo via open writer (an open source version of microsoft’s now defunct Live Writer blogging tool). Once upon a time when google photos was picasa web album you could also get a link to the ,jpeg file or embedded code that could be pasted in any regular HTML. Not any more I’m afraid, google will only let you play like that to google+, facebook and twitter (yes not even blogger). While the Open Writer connection still works I will keep using it but I am now a little less confident in its long term availability.
There are better places to publically share your photos, eg dropbox or flickr.
The private sharing is via share albums which you can allow others, with valid google accounts) to have access. Which is an improvement on having to make things publically viewable if you want to share.
The facial recognition isn’t to bad (possibly better than picasa’s)and once you identify them, add their google account IDs to the face and authorization to share with them and photos of friends and family can trigger a notification that you have a new photo of them, and they will be able to access the photo. I’m guessing this aimed at overly social teens and twenty something’s but I can see it ending in tears and regrets.
Unfortunately despite the claim better organization of your images via AI, the misclassification of places and things in my images is still overwhelmingly woeful. Ok I tend not to take tourist shots and I have travelled a lot BUT to only about half the places google think I’ve been. Under things I saw I’d supposedly taken about 50 shot of auroras! That is one of my biggest photographic desires and whilst I perhaps could have last weekend I am positive I never have. They were mainly star images with light horizons, nothing like auroras. The closest image was a strange green light I photographed in April 2010, it was in the western sky not the south and whilst i can’t explain it is probably not an aurora. (Google you keep disappointing me)
I also went on-line to my google photos web page, and its much the same as the last “upgrade” two year ago, but I did notice a new item called ARCHIVE with a new sticker beside it. Please don’t be decieved this isn’t anything like an archive it will keep all the photos but wont show then in the normal photos view. Presumably because people soon realis4 it is a very cluttered place it might be a much better alternative to not upload them in the first place. I must again stress google photo is not a safe place to store your only copy of your digital photos. If you must it can be used as one offsite place to have as a backup (particularly og phone photos) provide you have another backup under you control (like on your computers hard disk)
So I will keep any open mind, keep using google photos to hold my blog images and let it upload photos from my phone but I am unlikely to return to using google photos as my on-line place of choice to share or organise photos.
Trying the make a post today I keep getting a Token Response Error from Open Live Writer, seems google isn't playing fair with OAuth again.
Lets hope it gets fixed because Open Live Writer is the key component that makes Blogger usable. Don't just leave it to the Open LiveWriter team to fix Google, DO SOMETHING POSITIVE FOR A CHANGE...FIX IT or help the Open Live Writer Team understand why you are doing this.
Having to use the web interface for blogger to post this is, just bring out arcane the blogger tools are.
PS :: OK I fixed it myself, I had to "reconnect" the blog and google asked if I could authorize the blogger api for Open Live Writer. I did and the error disappeared. So Google had forgotten me!
I must admit I liked the Henri Rousseau Style images from my photos using google’s deep dream generator. So I decided to have a bit of fun using half a dozen famous Australian Landscape Painters.
Can you guess whose style I am using to render my two photos (above)? (answers in comments)
I have reviewed the chrome problems and noticed a few weird things (like pop ups trying to encourage software installs). I started to suspect some of the add-ins and chrome apps I had loaded (but mainly haven’t used). So I deleted chrome on the effected machines and re-installed it a fresh. Trouble is once you log in with your google account it picks up the previous settings. Still chrome is behaving now, and I will get rid of extension, apps and add-ins I don’t used (some time soon).
My other suspicion was at least some of these problems are related to was a virus, but my virus scans are up to date and came up all clear. All except my windows desktop which clams windows defender has been turned off by “group” policy. At the moment I can not find anyway to turn it back on.
The biggest niggling doubt is on my main desktop computer. Every time I restart the computer I get a swarm of windows notifications that “an app default” had to be reset. Which app? Why so many? And bugger now edge is behaving weirdly! How do I delete Edge?
Strangest of all I’ve quadruple checked and none of my windows machines has got the anniversary version of windows 10 yet!
thought I would give google photos another chance (probably it's third) it seemed pretty harmless. While I can see it is attempting to make sense of the mess. It just keeps making the mess bigger. At least the photo it autoloads it makes private, right, until you share them, right. Actually wrong all it does is use a 40 character code to make the photo link difficult to guess, this includes all the old photo from Picasa Web Album that you thought where safely private and only shared via a password. 
Unfortunately google is abandoning yet another photo product popular with users. Effective immediately they have formally notified that they no plans to updated (and support) the 
