SNOW FALLING on Google+

When I was, some weeks ago, learning how to make animated gifs  it was so difficult to make a good snowfall and it took such a long time.

I was thinking that I wanted to have a perfect moving snowfall ”already made” that I could place on new animated gifs.

But how would that be done? Maybe other people can make such a thing? Maybe I can invent it in some way? But for a little thing like the two bears it would have to be 45 different transparent layers with snow and they would have to be placed upon 45 other pictures in the right order.

I gave up and I thought that there are maybe other things to do in this world than to be focused on how to make snowfall on a moving gif. It seemed to require too much effort and it was hard for the eyes and maybe I was using the wrong method.

On December 5 the first snow was falling here and yesterday, on December 8, it was quite a thick layer of snow. The big machines, the scrapers, have now taken it away from the roads.
Some snow is still falling.

While I was making all my experiments with my snow-gifs I constantly told Karsten about it and I sent him all my experiments. (He is living in Copenhagen, but we know each other because he has a old house here in the forest).
During the last weeks I have sent him so many falling-snow-pictures that he must by now be quite tired of digital snowfalls.

Yesterday evening I talked with him on Skype and he sent me a photo that he had made of some brown flowers in the snow.

It was a good picture, but ”the thing” was that the photo was covered by a very nice and soft moving snowfall. It looked good! I would never be able to make it in such a nice way!

http://g2karsten.blogspot.se/2013/12/sne-korn.html

I know that he cannot make a moving gif because he has never even tried, so I thought that now he had suddenly got the idea and learned how to make it. Or maybe he had found some program that could make good snow?

-How did you do that, I asked him.

-I didn´t do anything, he answered.

-Hey! Come on! You got a normal jpg turned into a moving gif with a nice snowfall without doing anything???

-Yes!

-No!

-Yes!!!

-No!!! You must have done something!!!

-No Google+ did it.

-And you did not clic on anything???

-No!

-OK How come? Why? Do you get snowfall on ALL your pictures now?

-No. Google can recognize a picture with snow and if you put a snow-picture on Google+ this picture will automatically be turned into a moving gif with snow falling.

-Really? How long have you known that?

- It happened now, so it seems to be something new.

I googled on it and I found information that said that Google+  now has got something new: they can turn your photos into moving gifs by putting snowfall on them or by making them glimmer. This service seems to have started on May 15 this year.

I was then trying it, but I could not understand how to do it.
I managed to get snow only on one picture and two other pictures also started to move in other ways. I could not choose a photo. Google+ insisted in using 3 photos (that it picked out from different albums) and nothing else.
Not even a new photo with snow would work.

Karsten said that this is something that is so new that probably they have not yet made it work properly. In time they will fix the problems and make it easier to use.

But... I think that half a year would be enough to find out how to create an easy way to use it.
No, wait... here i see that "Twinkle" and "Snow" are their new effects.

http://www.hngn.com/articles/18914/20131206/google-introduces-two-new-auto-awesome-features-make-photos-more.htm

 I could download the gif from Google+, so here it is.

Actually it never snows from a bright blue sky.

But... it looks good anyway.

I had wished for an automatic snowfall to put on pictures and suddenly it was just there!

Amazing!

But I think that people would prefer to handle the effects by themselves, by using some easy clic-function, instead of just automatically getting snows and twinkles on a lot of photos.