Google is a technology partner in the "HIRL" or "Hang Out in Real Life," bringing together some of the biggest photographers with presences on Google+. While it is supporting the conference with Hangouts and talks by some Google employees, the conference isn't an official Google event.
“We are photographers ourselves,” Bradley Horowitz, VP of product at Google, said during the opening keynote for the conference Tuesday. “We are geeks. Photography geeks are a sublayer of geek, and there are a lot of us on the Google+ team”
While Google+ may be not be as popular on the social networking side as Facebook, the service is exceptionally popular for photographers, partly for how it handles content.
"Photos are the lifeblood of our service,” says Horowitz. "We wanted to make the content the hero.”
Photos on Google+ are typically displayed larger than they are on other services and offer several advantages for photographers, including the ability to carefully tailor which groups of people are able to see the photos uploaded to the service.
If you're not in San Francisco for the conference but love photography and Google+, you can still participate in the various sessions taking place over the next two days virtually via Google+ hangouts. Sessions are streamed live, and if you sign up for sessions via the Google+ Photographers conference app, you can ask questions during the talks and participate as if you were attending in person.