Back at Google I/O 2017, Google took the wraps off some neat new features that would soon make their way to Photos, though we weren’t sure when they’d begin rolling out. The company has just announced that Suggested Sharing and Shared Libraries will begin rolling out to Google Photos on Android, iOS, and the web starting today.
Let’s start with Suggested Sharing. This new feature uses machine learning to automatically identify photos and suggest people in your contacts who you might want to share with. In the Sharing tab of the Photos app, you’ll be able to see all your sharing activity, including photos sent to you and ones you’ve sent to others. This new menu will show your personal suggestions at the top based on your sharing habits and the people in the photos.
Plus, if your friends or family were with you at a particular event and happen to use Google Photos, the app will send them reminders to upload their photos to the album. You’ll then receive a notification when new photos are added.
Shared Libraries are also coming to Google Photos, which will allow you to, as the name suggest, share full photo libraries with another user.
If you’d like to share your library with another user, tap Share your library on the top left of the app, then enter the recipient’s email address. You’ll then be able to share your entire photo library, or customize which photos you’d like to share. You can also give the recipient access to photos from a certain day, which is certainly a nice touch.
Once the recipient accepts the invitation, all photos you upload from then on will automatically be shared with them. The best part? The person you’re sharing photos with will be able to use your photos as their own. That means the recipient can search through the photos, and they’ll also show up in movies, collages, and other creations in Google Photos.
Want to give this new feature a shot? Head to the Play Store link below to download the latest Google Photos update.
Recent updates
Father’s Day movies
June 15: Google Photos wants to help you celebrate Father’s Day with some homemade movies. Similar to the Mother’s Day video feature it rolled out earlier in the year, the Google Photos Father’s Day function helps you pool together family snaps to create a compilation video. Head to http://ift.tt/2rs46aM and sign in and get started. Once you’re logged in, you can select an image of your father from your pictures (Google doesn’t discriminate here, you can select anybody that you have a photo of), and then select the photos of children which will appear alongside him in the video. Next, click the “Go to Assistant” button to render the video.
Auto archive photos
June 5: In the previous update, Google added the option of archiving images in Photos, which removes them from the main image feed. The feature just got a lot smarter, as Assistant is now capable of suggesting the images it thinks you might be interested in archiving.
The feature mostly focuses on documents found in your photo library, which you probably don’t look at every day. A notification will pop up when Assistant finds appropriate images in the gallery, which you can then review. If there are any images included that you don’t want to archive, you can simply unselect them and they will stay in the main image feed. The final step is to just tap on the archive button and the images that are selected will be moved to the Archive folder you can access from the navigation panel.
Archive photos
May 25: This update added the option of removing pictures from the main Photos tab without deleting them. It’s a useful feature to have and very simple to use, as all you have to do is tap and hold on an image and select the “Archive” option that appears in the top right corner. You can then access all the images from the new Archive menu option that’s in the navigation panel.
Video stabilization
April 13: In version 2.13, Google Photos introduced an impressive video stabilization feature that makes your shaky videos a little bit nicer to watch. The feature is available in the Videos tab of the Albums section. For any given video, tap on the pencil icon to edit it and then pick the Stabilize option. There is some warping and other artifacts in some cases, but the video stabilization is actually quite good, so make sure to give it a try. You can check out a demo of the feature in action here.