The fact that pretty much everybody has a phone in their pocket with a camera and an Internet connection means that we are an exceptionally well-documented species. Some of this is good, some of this is bad, but no matter how much we bitch about pictures of food and duckface, it’s not going anywhere.
But now, if you come across a photo you actually want to look at, in detail, Google+ is letting you zoom in. We give it maybe a day before somebody posts to your Facebook about how in Google+ you can totally zoom in on boobs.
It’s actually a fairly straightforward feature. Just click on a photo to put it on your lightbox, then turn your scroll wheel. If you’re on a laptop and using a trackpad, you might have to run your finger across the scroll bar before the zoom feature pops up, but it does kick in.
We went screwing around on Google+ trying it out — mostly scanning Kate Upton photos images of the glory of nature — and we’ve got to admit that while it doesn’t work for every photo, and it can be spotty to make it work unless you’re on a desktop… when you can make it work, it’s really neat. With high resolution photos especially, it really brings out the gorgeous detail and lets you examine them closely and at length.
Of course, when you can’t get it to work, for some reason or another, you pretty much flail around like an idiot. You might need to choose the photo and then reload it, which, seriously, it’s the twenty-first century and we have to do the equivalent of smacking the TV to get it to work?
Still, at least when it works, it’s amazing.