Transcript

Rachid Finge Today, we’re talking to Zachary Senzer, who works on Google Photos and the new Magic Editor. Zach, thanks for coming back. You're a senior product manager on Google Photos. We spoke back in March. What have you been up to since then?

Zach Senzer Yeah, it's great to see you again. Thank you so much for having me. Overall it's a lot warmer than it was since we last chatted in March here in New York. And besides being really excited for the fall due to the wonderful weather we're gonna be having in the city, it also means that there's a lot of really exciting new Pixel features that I'm excited about. And one of the ones that I'm particularly interested and excited by is Magic Editor.

Rachid Finge So Magic Editor first on Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. In your own words, how would you describe Magic Editor?

Zach Senzer I'd say the best way to describe it is a new editor that's powered by generative AI that really helps you reimagine your photos with the overall goal of making editing even easier for you. And I'd say it's this continuation of a paradigm shift that we talked about in the prior episode around really wanting to take these complex edits and make them far easier for people. And the hallmark of that is taking these really complex operations, making them really easy to do through these intuitive interactions.

Rachid Finge So you brought in generative AI into a photo editor. When did the team start thinking and developing this feature?

Zach Senzer We've been thinking about how to make editing more intuitive for years now on Google Photos. And overall Google Photos has this long track record of leveraging things like AI to take these challenging tasks and make them far easier for people. Even from when we first launched the product in its early days, we had things such as searching by the people, places and things in your photos, which was pretty revolutionary at the time. And this has especially held true for us in the editing space as well.

In the prior episode, we talked a lot about Magic Eraser and Photo Ucnblur, and I'd say that Magic Editor is basically the next paradigm shift in this space for us of leveraging AI in the editing space and to kind of think about why we're even doing this feature in the first place.

Editing is really difficult, and so Magic Editor is about continuing this mission to take these complex edits and make them a lot easier for people. So whether it's removing background distractions or improving the composition of your shot overall, we really want to make it as helpful as possible for you to get your best photo.

Rachid Finge So what is an example of a situation where I might want to use Magic Editor?

Zach Senzer I think these situations are best tried out on your own images, and one that really comes to mind for me when my mind was absolutely blown away by the power of the feature was I was looking through all the older photos that I scanned into Google photos in my library, and there was this one older picture of my brother and I on a beach when we were kids.

And because it was this older picture, it wasn't particularly vibrant, it wasn't composed well because we didn't have the luxury of these smartphones where we could just take a ton of photos until it turned out great. I'm sure if you went through the process of taking your older images and putting them into Google Photos, there's probably many of these types of images that you can resonate with that fall under that camp. So needless to say, it was this great memory, but the photo really just didn't do it justice. But I was able to take this photo and resize, center and reposition my brother and I - making us closer together and putting the focus on us, which was a pretty magical experience.

And then I was able to take the sunny day and the ocean waves and really emphasize them because as I mentioned, it was an older photo. They were pretty washed out, not highlighting how beautiful the day was. And of course, I was able to take the beach goers that were there, remove them, add some subtle blur in the background to place even more focus on me and my brother.

And this all sounds great in theory, but the part that was truly mind blowing for me was I was able to do all of this in just a few taps. So it was seamless. It was easy. Now I was able to take this image that was this really precious memory but the overall quality of the image was not quite there, but make it this really dramatic shift in terms of how awesome this image looked.

Rachid Finge I'm suddenly thinking, Zach, when you start working on Magic Editor at that point, you cannot be sure I guess if it will ever make it into a product until moments like you just described, right?

Zach Senzer Yeah, it's really hard, especially when working on this cutting edge. There's so much that needs to happen in terms of the development of the technology, the development of the feature. So it's always this magical experience when everything finally comes together and you have this wonderful blending of the intuitive user experience with this cutting edge technology.

Rachid Finge Now, when it comes to editing, I guess there can be a bit of a tension between fixing a photo and then maybe creating something completely inauthentic. So where do you stand on that debate?

Zach Senzer It's a great question and it's an important question also. And to me, I feel like it's kind of at the core of the question of what's the role of editing in general.

And so for me, we all capture these photos and videos and as I talked about in the earlier example of my brother and I on this beach, sometimes the content that we capture just doesn't quite represent the aesthetic or the emotion of the memory. And it can be due to a variety of different reasons. Maybe the lighting wasn't great, like I mentioned, the picture was washed out, or the composition also isn't great, maybe the subjects are too far apart or they're far away not positioned in the right way. And so, in my opinion, through editing, you can basically opt to take your content and make it feel authentic to the memory that you actually experienced. And I'd say bringing focus to what really matters the most to you in the memories that you capture overall.

So tying it back to the example of my brother and I on the beach, the focus should be on my brother and I. It shouldn't be on the beach goers. Someone shouldn't be distracted by this really washed out water that doesn't really look like water. The scene should be separate. It should make it indicative of the moment in memory that feels authentic to have you remember it.

Rachid Finge 00:07:12 Can you talk a little bit about the challenges, when creating Magic Editor, because you mentioned this is cutting edge AI. I guess three years ago we wouldn't have been able to launch anything like this because the technology just wasn't ready for it. What are the kind of challenges that you face when you're off the beaten path like this?

Zach Senzer 00:07:30 Yeah, definitely wouldn't have been able to launch three years ago, let alone three months ago. Um, many challenges that the team faced along the way.

The first thing I'd say is there's been so much rapid development in this space, and I'm sure all the listeners have been seeing so many articles come out the past handful of months about AI and generative AI. So it's been so critical for the team to keep a pulse on all the exciting progress that's happening, not only within Google, but also the external landscape.

One of the other really key challenges that we face is generative AI can be highly unpredictable at times. And so because of this, we're launching Magic Editor as an experience from labs, and it's really important to keep in mind that it's in its early stages and there's going to be times when the result just isn't exactly what you imagined.

You're going to do an edit, you're gonna see some results and be like, Hmm, that, that kind of missed the mark a little bit. And so your feedback is going to be really critical in helping us improve the product over time so that way you can continue to get the best edits possible.

And some other things that the team needed to do along the way in developing the feature, are first a ton of brainstorms. We wanna make sure AI is in service of an actual underlying problem that we can solve for people, and not just something that we can sprinkle in there for the sake of sprinkling in AI. And so we had lots of discussions with the team and also externally with people who use the product, the types of edits that they wish they could make, but that are really challenging today.

Zach Senzer 00:08:53 And that influenced the set of these one tap suggestions and presets that we created in Magic Editor. So for example, being able to create a beautiful sunset when maybe you're taking a picture and it's not as vibrant as you would've wanted, or getting a really beautiful portrait shot that has some nice subtle blur in the background and no distractions. So lots of discussion together to make sure we were solving some really key problems.

And then the other big challenge is kind of around inspiration. When you're handed this really powerful technology that can do so many different things, it's sometimes tough to figure out, look, where do I get started with this? And so something that the team did was we created this photo album where we were all adding our edits that we were making together with Magic Editor. And it was really inspiring, to see all the different ideas and help showcase all the magic and potential that could exist behind the feature. And editing is generally a lot more fun when you share your masterpiece, whether it be sharing internally as you're working on a feature in a photo album or whether you're posting what you share and sharing it with close friends and family. So that made the development of the feature also a lot more enjoyable besides just inspiring us about all the magic that can exist with the feature

Rachid Finge You went through some examples of what Magic Editor can do. So add some blur, probably change the sky a little bit to match the memory more. What are other examples of things Magic Editor can do really easily for any one of us?

Zach Senzer Some of the things that are really special with Magic Editor involve repositioning and resizing the subject. So maybe the composition isn't quite right and you can take the subject and make sure they're really in focus. So you can select them by just simply tapping them. You can then tap and hold pinch and zoom to make them a little bigger, drag them and center them across the scene. You can also erase a lot of background distractions we talked about, to make sure the subject is really the star of the image and the focus is where you want it to be.

Rachid Finge 00:10:52 I've been able to try Magic Editor a while back for the first time, and I found this contradiction so interesting that it is so powerful, yet incredibly easy to use. Like there are no sliders or values I have to type in. How did you land on this user interface that is very clean? I mean, it's just like you mentioned tapping and circling things.

Zach Senzer 00:11:16 The first thing was kind of suspending what we know about these traditional editing interfaces. You're mentioning all of these different sliders and tools and while they exist in so many different editors today, they're not always the most intuitive or understandable interfaces for people, especially people who just aren't really familiar with how to edit. So we tried to take a step back and rethink what would actually be more helpful.

And so a few of those different types of interactions ended up making it into the final product. For example, being able to simply tap or circle the object you wanna edit or just being able to do a nice drag gesture to reposition your subject in addition to all these different one tap presets, so that way you don't have to spend a lot of time trying to manipulate the image to get a really great result.

Zach Senzer And then one of the other things which is maybe a little underrated, but I think is particularly helpful is being able to see all these different edit renditions that you have after you want to do an edit. Many times when you try to do an edit, you get a result and it's like, oh, it's kind of close, maybe 90% of the way there, but not quite that. So in Magic Editor, we provide multiple different outputs for you to select from and browse from, you could even regenerate more results. So it really allows you to keep using the feature until you get a result that feels quite right and authentic to what you're trying to achieve.

Rachid Finge Something we love to do on the Made By Google podcast is offer our listeners a top tip, something they should try with the Magic Editor in this case. What do you think our listeners should try when they have the Magic Editor in front of them?

Zach Senzer I mentioned this older photo of my brother and I on this beach, and I think one of the most precious ways to experience Google Photos and all these editing features is to get all your older content and your older memories within Google Photos. And so it's important to also go back to the older photos in your library, including the ones that you didn't even capture yourself. And I had the opportunity to enhance so many different images from decades back with Magic Editor and it really made these older memories that are inherently so precious by themselves even more special to me. So it was a very rewarding experience and I highly recommend that.

Rachid Finge 00:13:34 That's a great point. I've only been editing recent pictures. I should definitely go back in time a little bit now,

Zach, speaking about going back in time, if I could take this podcast episode and have you listen to this six years ago when you joined Google, would you have believed you'd be working on anything like this?

Zach Senzer 00:13:52 It's pretty remarkable. Overall, I definitely did not believe that we would have the opportunity to do something like this.

As I mentioned, I'm not someone who is a professional editor, but someone who definitely wants my content to look beautiful and authentic. So to start working on this mission has been a very rewarding experience for me. And to see a lot of people get so much value out of these features that we're building has also been truly remarkable.

And I'd say that Magic Editor specifically has been easily one of the most innovative and exciting advancements that we've had to date, not only in terms of the functionality such as repositioning subjects in the scene, but even that user experience that we mentioned of making it really intuitive and helpful and not needing to rely on these cumbersome sliders and tools to make things a lot more approachable for the everyday person.

And it's important to note though, that while we continue to make really good progress, I continue to personally be really humbled by the amount of opportunity that still remains before us to help users bring out the best in their photos and videos, and also do so in a way that's very, very intuitive and helpful. We've made really good strides in the space, whether it be with Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur and now Magic Editor, but there's still so much headroom and potential here that I'm really excited to tackle in the years ahead.

And the other really important thing is that it's critical for us to get feedback from everyone listening here, not only to improve Magic Editor, but also so that we can continue to create these experiences that are as helpful as possible to you. So please keep all the great feedback coming.

Rachid Finge If I think back about the conversation we had back in March, the one thing that's stood out for me was, you mentioning democratizing photography, which how I remember it is making sure that everyone and anyone can capture memories and preserve them no matter where they come from, no matter their skill level. And you've contributed a lot of features towards that goal. So if you think of all these features in Google Photos that you've worked on, where, where does Magic Editor sit in terms of achieving that goal?

Zach Senzer It's definitely one of the most exciting and important when it comes to not only the capabilities that we launched within it, but also the user experience being very helpful and assistive.

We mentioned all the different interactions earlier, such as being able to do things in one tap and tap and circle different subjects. I think it's a really important stride and breakthrough in this space to help democratize these edits that are traditionally very complex and not approachable for people. Make them a lot more accessible and intuitive for you.

Rachid Finge 00:16:22 Thanks a lot, Zach. I'm sure we'll meet again.

Zach Senzer 00:16:24 Thank you so much for having me.

Rachid Finge So if you're interested in trying Magic Editor, uh, make sure you get your Pixel 8 or Pixel 8 Pro and try Magic editor in Google Photos. Zach, thank you so much for joining the podcast and I'm sure we'll have you back soon again.