Colorized history is spellbinding in its own unique way, which is why it has both a dedicated subreddit and a meme format to itself. To make the process of getting black and white images colorized easy, a feature named "Colorize" was announced for Google Photos during last year's Google I/O. However, it was swept under the rug along the way, even though it was promised to roll out last summer itself. Now, after a year of silence from the Google Photos team, we have come to learn that Colorize will soon be available, beginning with a beta launch.
While the process may seem simple on the top, what goes on under the hood is much complicated. At the keynote last year, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai announced that Colorize and other spectacular features in Google Photos are powered by the company's expertise in machine learning. While that's all Pichai went to say about it, what's more important is that Colorize should soon be accessible by the plethora of Android users.
David Lieb, Google Photos' product lead, recently announced that Colorize is still under development and needs finishing. The fact that Lieb actually posted a demo of the feature suggests that we may get to use the feature shortly. He confirmed this in a follow-up tweet, suggesting that the feature will be available via beta soon so that Google can learn from users' feedback.
Lieb used an image of his grandparents to demo Colorize, highlighting that the algorithm may not produce very accurate colors, which can be a key attribute that may differentiate Google's AI-backed toolkit from simpler solutions available online. Since vision-based cues are less articulated and tougher to crack compared to written resources, perfecting colors on older, hazier might be a challenging task.
We expect to hear more on the feature from Google soon, but the lack of a clear deadline from Lieb only leaves us wondering about "when?"