Google Open Gallery

If you expand the list of services from Google's support page, you'll find an interesting service: Open Gallery. Clicking the link redirects you to the main Google support site.

I tried to find this service and searched for [open gallery]. Most of the results are about art galleries. Google actually has a service that brings museums online: Google Cultural Institute's Art Project. "Museums large and small, classic and modern, world-renowned and community-based from over 40 countries have contributed more than 40,000 high-resolution images of works ranging from oil on canvas to sculpture and furniture. Some paintings are available in 'gigapixel' format, allowing you to zoom in at brushstroke level to examine incredible detail," explains Google.

I've checked the source code of some Art Project pages and found this: "New! Artists, museums, galleries, archives: discover Google Open Gallery, powerful free tools to bring your content online." Google Open Gallery pointed to google.com/opengallery.

Update: Google Open Gallery is now available. "Google Open Gallery makes the technologies behind Google's cultural projects (Art Project, Historic Moments, World Wonders), plus additional tools, freely available to everyone to publish their artwork, archives, and other cultural content. Anyone, including individual artists and collectors, galleries and museums, and any organisation with an archive they want to share, can use Google Open Gallery." You only need to request an invitation.

{ Thanks, TomHTML and Artem. }

More In-Depth Articles in Google Search

For general queries like [global warming], [love], [Mandela], [China], Google shows some in-depth news articles at the bottom of the first page of results. Until now, Google only included 3 articles, but this has changed: you can click "more in-depth articles" and get 5 more articles.

Google also added some related queries you can explore to find other related articles. Clicking the "explore" links sends you to a page that places in-depth articles at the top, but also shows regular search results. Google adds &ida_m=1 to the search URL.

{ Thanks, Rubén. }

Google's Mobile Image Search Adds Menu

Google updated the mobile interface for Image Search launched in October. I've only noticed the change in Chrome and Safari for iPhone, but it doesn't seem to be an experiment.

Google now shows a three-dot menu with options like "visit page", "view image", "send feedback" and "search by image", instead of using links. You can still swipe to go to the next or previous image result and tapping the image sends you to the most relevant page that includes it.

Auto Awesome, Winter Special

This is beautiful and clever. Google+ added 2 auto awesome effects just in time for Christmas.

1) Twinkle: upload a new photo of something that sparkles (like a Christmas tree or a chandelier), and we'll gift you a version with lights that actually twinkle.

2) Snow: upload a new photo with snow to Google+, and we'll gift you a version with snow that’s actually falling.

Here are 2 examples:

Please note that this only works for new photos. Check the animations generated for other Google+ users: #AutoAwesomeTwinkle and #AutoAwesomeSnowGlobe.

Export Gmail and Google Calendar Data

Google Takeout now lets you export your calendars and it will soon add a similar feature for Gmail. The calendar exporting feature is not new - you could find it in the Google Calendar settings, but it's nice to see that Google Takeout gets more comprehensive and adds support for new services.

The Gmail exporting feature is completely new and it will be gradually released next month. It will let you download a big MBOX file you can import in mail clients like Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail. You can also use this feature to backup your Gmail messages and read them offline.

"You can download all of your mail and calendars or choose a subset of labels and calendars. You can also download a single archive file for multiple products with a copy of your Gmail, Calendar, Google+, YouTube, Drive, and other Google data," informs Google.

The Old Google Contacts, No Longer Available

The old version of Google Contacts was available at www.google.com/contacts_v1, but now it redirects to the standard version. It was a much simpler site that worked better on a mobile phone or tablet and it had more accessibility features for screenreader users.

You can still use the basic HTML Google Contacts available at https://mail.google.com/mail/h/?v=cl.

{ Thanks, +Katty Geltmeyer. }

Location Autocomplete in Google Calendar

When you enter a location for a Google Calendar event, Google now shows a list of suggestions. For example, if you type "Google H", one of the suggestions is "Google Headquarters". The nice thing is that Google also adds the address.

It's not clear how suggestions are ranked, but they're different from the Google Maps search suggestions. Nearby places are placed at the top of the list even if they're not that important.

{ Thanks, John Wilke. }