This Bot Helps You Find Forgotten Kodak Moments
Over the course of a year, I take thousands of pictures, which I either post on Facebook or Instagram, or leave to die in the film of my smartphone. While the idea is that I’ll come back and look at them at some point, in truth, this rarely happens. The closest I get is when something pops up in a conversation, I remember I took a photo years ago and I search Google Photos or my Facebook photo gallery to see if I can find it, what I’m doing in about 50% of cases. Kodak now has a new Facebook app and bot designed specifically to help you unearth those awesome memories you capture and then forget.
A few years ago, I wrote a story in a magazine about how I think digital photographs are destroying our memories. At that time, I moved around and dug out box after box of printed photographs. There were hundreds of pictures inside that I forgot about from events that I did not remember at all. Flipping through pictures was a wonderful experience. Wonderful experience that I could not reproduce.
The Kodak Moments Facebook bot is my closest experience. The Facebook bot (and app) looks at the photos in your phone’s camera roll or your Facebook photo gallery and creates several of them for you to view at once.
It’s not exactly the best experience. I used a version of the Facebook bot that is supposed to use artificial intelligence and algorithms to display the photos that matter to me.
“The app now takes advantage of our unique imaging capabilities to automatically display your most important camera memories on your phone or device,” said David Newhoff, vice president of product, Kodak Moments, in a press release announcing the app. and bot.
For me, all science could do first was find my most popular Facebook posts of the past year, specifically about people like Woz, Snoop Dogg, and Tom Bulleit, who I posted pictures with on Facebook after interviewing them. Yes, these photos are great memories, but they have also been for the last 6 months and turned out to be my most popular posts. Not exactly pleasant memories that I need to be reminded of.
You receive images in small groups of four. After this first series of recent photographs, I kept asking for more. My second group included a photo from a year ago of Hanson’s brother pouring me a beer and, oddly enough, a photo of shitty people left behind at my house after a Christmas party in 2010. It was … a memory.
It took my fifth try before I could get to things that were actually fond memories with unknown people that I would like to remember. Although the time between the photos of group 1 and group 5 was probably a few minutes, it took a little time. I also found out that I seem to be posting a lot of pictures of famous people, so that was the conclusion.
However, the experience was really enjoyable. My fifth attempt included a baby photo of my dog turning 100 this weekend (dog years). It was fun to share with friends who didn’t know him back then, and the more I chatted with the bot, the more funny memories came up.
It’s kind of like Facebook’s “This Day” feature, but with no time limit. Some of what you’re about to get will be fun, but mostly bullshit. Even if you know it, you want to keep going back and looking, and there is a good chance that at least one of the four given to you in each game will be the winner.
And the whole point of the bot and the app is to try and sell you prints. However, I didn’t need the prints, and I was able to use it with the only connector to purchase the printed images, which was the link at the bottom of the image offering “Print for free”. It’s not hard to ignore.
You can try the Kodak bot on Facebook by posting to the Kodak Moments Assistant . The app is also available for iPhone and Android , although using Facebook seems to be much better than using the mobile app.