iPhone Friday is not a regular feature here, but it pops up from time to time. Yesterday there was a deep fog settled over my neighborhood and I grabbed this quick shot and then processed it completely on my iPhone.

One weird thing happened along the way. I have my iPhone set to automatically upload photos to Google Plus. They remain private unless I choose to share them, but it’s a convenient feature. I also have enabled what Google calls “Auto Awesome.” This is a feature that lets Google play with your images and try to create cool effects. It always leaves an original untouched. The most common effect it makes is to combine multiple photos taken within a short time frame and automatically create a motion GIF.  Yesterday they just enabled two new possibilities – making appropriate photos snow or twinkle. The snow effect is only supposed to show up when there is snow on the ground in the photo. People tried to trick it with white sand and other similar effects, and as far as I know nobody succeeded without significant image manipulation. such as the image at the link where the photographer had to add in false mountains and trees before G+ would add snow to a beach scene But for some reason the algorithm took a different version of the photo above, processed in color but with a result I did not quite love, and Google added snow, which you can see below.

It’s a winter wonderland.