The question about what is a good photo has always been in the eye of he beholder. I do like this photo.

My son, Luca, made this, but it could have been myself. He started playing with my camera, spinning around taking images at an art installation, Eternal Sundown by Mads Vegas, in Copenhagen.

I’m an avid user of a Google Chromecast to show my “best” pictures on the TV in our living room, so naturally he asked if I could put this one up too. Of course he should be allowed to have his images up, just like me, on the TV.

So back home I made him an album and started to share it, but no – it did not come up. I made an album with just his image, but no – it did not come up, only the gallery images, Ok, I found that the was a minimum of four images, ok – now I had 6 .. 5 random images and Luca’s image, but his did still not show up!

After quite a bit of searching I found some information, Google curate your pictures for you.

Photo curation
Google Photos automatically attempts to select what it thinks are the best photos from your Live Albums and Recent Highlights. From your existing private and shared albums, Google Photos attempts to remove objectively bad photos (blurry, poor exposure, low resolution, near duplicates) but will not otherwise curate the contents of your albums. No curation at all is done on your Favorites.

https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/6080931

Note that they write that they will not curate images what is Favorite (aka, afik, stared). I could not get it to work, even with some additional support from a very friendly person from google support, it’s still not working.

Update 2019-02-07: After some experimenting a bit I found that what the Google Support person ment was that we should display the Favorite folder, stared images in a regular folder will not be shown, but all images from the Favorite folder (auto generated from all stared images) will be shown. I personally do not think it’s a good solution as stared images can be used in many ways and who know how many of them you want to show up on your Tv – but it does work and Luca was exited when it came up on the screen.

See the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and Google is not the beholder of this image. I can see why curation on big huge albums may be great. You know the 2048 images from the last trip to the beach with the family, of which maybe 32-64 are even mostly ok. It’s awesome not to have to make the call on which ones will be shown, but not being able to refuse curation, or even better – why include curation on small albums anyway?

We are still waiting for a solution from google, but I can say I really love the new ability to add Chrome Cast (video) to an audio group, and have my own ambient selection shown while music plays and have the song being played shown as an overlay on top of the images. Nice Google.