I am an amateur photographer who capture precious moments to store in my memory bank, as and when the memorable scenes appear in front of my eyes.

A camera, however intelligently programmed with image technology with the lens, is merely a mechanical computerised tool …

On Sunday 28 September, 2014,  I was blessed with a bright, sunny morning at Beach Road, Singapore and did not expect to capture a few of these unforgettable moments.

On the right of the photo above was the Suntec City while on the left was the traffic jam at the Beach Road flyover,  a contrast of the scene, sound and sight.

It was the first time to photograph at this spot after the construction of the Bugis Downtown Line MRT station was completed recently,  four years later  – “Delivering a People-Centred Land Transport System”.

The above photo of the poster was displayed on the hoarding in 2010.  Reeling backwards to a 4-year-old blog “What Happened To The Former New 7th Storey Hotel” here .

What we see today

New “Thingy” @ Google+

At the end of the day,  my Samsung Galaxy K-Zoom Android phone had a pop-up of the screen as shown on the above photo.

This is something new.  The Google+ app was activated and I then realized that the photos I had taken on Sunday was created as a Google+ stories automatic scrapbook.   Please check it out here .

It was able to pick out my best photos for the day and organize them into a visual journal.

The story was compiled when users backed up their photos and videos to Google+ by dates. The feature will be integrated into both web and mobile versions of Google+.

The tool relies on Google’s Auto Awesome and landmark detection tools, as well as a user’s location history and the geotags of individual photos.  It will be able to automatically find the best photos from your library, tag images with city names, and display the places visited.

Users will be notified of a new story within 24 hours of  the photos taken on the Android phone camera each day.  All stories are private by default, but users can edit or share stories publicly after they are created.

Google+ Story was rolled out on the web and Android using the iOS app.  That was how the Story popped out on my smartphone screen at the end of the day.

iOS app, the new multimedia, scrapbooking-like feature which automatically combines your photos, videos and places you visit into a travelogue.

With Stories, the idea is to form some sort of narrative out of all those photos, and do so without you having to take the time to build content collections yourself.   Instead, Google+ Stories will find your best shots algorithmically, then combine that with location data in order to create distinct collections of photos, video, and text.

When viewed, these Stories launch multimedia experiences that take over your browser like a slideshow on steroids, with support for animations, transitions, captions and interstitials.  Like your auto-uploaded photos themselves, your Stories are private by default, letting you make edits, add or remove content, and change the captions before choosing to share them. When new Stories have been created for you, you’ll be notified by a push notification.

After exploring the  “creative” work on Google+,  I found that the story scrapbook was not very accurate.   It provides only a framework as “skeletons” which the user need to add layers of “flesh” to complete the job.

Human intervention is still required to put in the final touches which “robots” would never be able to notice or interpret the story with details.  Great efforts anyway.  Thank you, Google!

I was at the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) bus-stop outside Google Headquarters on my way to the Computer History Museum at Mountain View, CA about a decade ago.