Skógafoss is a must-see, everyone said, and in a country with as much natural beauty as Iceland, that means it's going to be some majestic shit. The waterfall didn't disappoint, but even on a cool weekday in March the place was packed with people. My photos – and come on, you have to take photos – were littered with tourists in puffy coats, all taking their own photos of the falls. Not exactly the stuff you print out and hang on the wall.
A few months later, at Google's annual developer conference, I saw an image of the same waterfall appear on the screen as the company demonstrated its new AI-powered Magic Editor. In this version, a tourist in puffy sleeves stood in front of the falls on a gray day. CEO Sundar Pichai talks about the changes taking place on the screen. The sky turns blue, the woman is repositioned, her outfit is refreshed. Pichai notes that he can use the tool to “get rid of some clouds” and brighten the scene to make it “look as sunny as you remember.”
The thing about photos is that they are unforgiving
Phone makers have emphasized blue skies and smooth skin for years, but the latest generation of Pixels, Galaxy and iPhones are using AI to push photo manipulation further than ever before. Magic Editor on the Pixel 9 includes a new option called Reimagine. Instead of simply deleting or moving objects, you can now add things using just text input. Replace the background; Sprinkle some rainbows and butterflies on top. It serves to set the scene for you rememberwhich doesn't depict the scene exactly as you saw it, at least said Pixel Camera Prime Minister Isaac Reynolds Wired Earlier this year. They are memories, not photos.
The thing about photos is that they are unforgiving. Photos tend to show us things we would otherwise ignore – things we have personally learned to ignore show up in images as glaring distractions. In one of my favorite photos of my son from last year, he is sitting on the living room couch wearing a firefighter's hat, laughing hard at something with pure joy on his face.
But there's still the problem with our couch, which is literally falling apart after years of withstanding cats' claws. My brain blocked out the frayed upholstery long ago, but when I look at the photo, I immediately notice the imperfections. The ability to eliminate distractions and focus on the subject is very appealing, even to a photography purist like me. But can it really be called a photo at this point?
If there are photos vibes, Then you can add whatever you want to them
Things get incredibly messy the more you try to define the definition of a photo. But as an exercise, I decided to put the tools to the test and force myself into this mindset of capturing memories, not photos. Would I like the images I created? Would I be comfortable even calling them photos? I took a Pixel 9 Pro on some family adventures one weekend, took even more photos than I normally would as a family photographer, and then spent some time editing them in Google Photos using these AI tools. And for fun, I edited a few older photos to see if AI could actually bring my photos closer to my memories.
If there are photos vibes and no more photos, then you can add whatever you want to them – as long as it's commemorative. Maybe I don't have much imagination, or maybe the Reimagine tool is just too broad for this exercise, but I had a hard time finding use cases for it. In the picture of my child running through a field, I added a flock of birds in the sky. It looks plausible and nice, I think. But if it's a good photo, it's probably because the light was really nice and my kid has a big smile on his face – and not because of the AI birds.
I switched gears and focused on using the less nihilistic tools in Google Photos' AI toolbox. During the “taking photos, er memories” portion of the exercise, I pushed myself to take shots that I would normally leave out: a stranger standing around in the frame, or a lot of clutter in the background. And guess what? AI is really good at fixing things like this.
As part of recording “memories,” I removed things from my images that did not serve as a reminder of the scene. When I looked at my photos, I initially had a hard time even recognizing some of these things. They looked the way they looked because that was what was there. But what about the black strap of a diaper bag on my husband's shoulder? I don't think I remember it clearly because it's something one of us always carries with us on our trips. With a few taps it would disappear from the picture and I would never notice the difference.
And while taking a whole crowd out of my waterfall scene didn't improve the memorability of my photo, I found Magic Editor much more useful for taking one or two people out of an image. Three-year-olds are tiny little people who usually don't cooperate when you wait for the perfect moment to take a photo – that includes waiting for someone to disappear from the background of my shot. Magic Editor convinced me that I could still take these photos and just remove the people after the fact.
You can't turn a bad photo into a good photo
It's also possible that the cleanup goes too far. I removed a trash can from the background of a picture of my son at a playground. But why stop there? I used reimagine to take out a building that had some toilets in it and replace it with trees. The resulting photo is absolutely convincing and of course the public toilets are not a central part of my memory of that day. But the photo is also more generic and boring. We could be at any playground in the greater Seattle area or perhaps across the country. I dismantled the building.
That was my overwhelming impression during this experiment. There are many things I like to take out of a photo, such as the crusty snot under my child's nose or piles of mice scattered on the sidewalk where he is standing. But it's very easy to cross a line and take so much out of an image that you actually remove the context and the imperfections that gave it character.
This exercise also confirmed my belief that you can't turn a bad photo into a good photo. Trust me, I've spent hours trying over the years. But this applies to both traditional photo editing and crazy AI tools. Good lighting and thoughtful composition add much more to a photo than a lot of tinkering in Photoshop.
The photo I took of Skógafoss – which I tried to clean up with AI – is actually my least favorite photo of the day. After taking the “Here’s the Famous Thing” photo, I walked around trying to find different angles and interesting details to point my camera at. A pair of birds nesting in a mossy rock face, a woman in a red coat and pants posing for the camera on a selfie stick, a view of the blue sky shot through the fog near the base of the falls: They are the photos I like the best from this day. They are the images that best capture the memory of the feeling of being there.
Do I believe there is a place for AI photo editing tools? Secure. I'm honestly blown away by how much better Magic Eraser is in the AI age, and I think I'll actually take more photos that I would otherwise write off, knowing I can eliminate an obvious distraction afterward. But AI doesn't change the fundamentals of a good photo, at least for me. There's still no substitute for being on location, having good lighting, or capturing the right expression on your subject's face. Because what is a memory if not imperfect?
Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge