Goggles update makes your smartphone pictures smarter by automatically identifying what's in your photos

Like the concept of Google Goggles but don’t want to have to individually upload each image to find out if Google can identify landmarks, paintings and other objects of interest in your photos?

The latest version of Google's image recognition software for Android smartphones, Goggles 1.6, gives users the option to have all the images they capture on their phone’s camera automatically analyzed in the background.

"Let’s say that I’m going on vacation, and I decide to use my Android-powered phone as my primary camera. Goggles would identify landmarks, paintings and other interesting objects in my photos. I can share these facts about my vacation with my friends right from my Goggles search history," explains Google software engineer Pavel Vodensk in a September 14 blog post.

The feature is opt-in (by launching Google Goggles and tapping Menu > Settings > Search from Camera), however, as Google has to upload the images to its own servers to analyze the images with Google Goggles.

Google explains that the images "have to be uploaded in order to be analyzed; everything Google does is in the cloud because your phone's hardware couldn't possibly handle the processing and storage required, without being useless for everything else. This is why it's opt-in."

People that don’t have an Android smartphone can take advantage of Google's image recognition software on Google.com by clicking on the "images" search option and dragging an image they want to know more about into the search box.

Google Goggles 1.6 can be downloaded from the Android Market by Android-powered smartphone users using Android 2.1 and above.