Category: Google Photos

The Google Photos site is now starting to show an option to allow you to merge faces in your library.  Photos since the beginning has had facial recognition built into it and has done a reasonable job of helping you identify people in your albums and tagging them.  The challenge with it has come with age progression of children and photos of peoples at odd angles.  It seems that the Photos team have be doing a bit of work on the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms on the feature.

On the Google Photos site, if you go to the Albums tab and click on People & Pets album, you will see a banner at the top of the page with suggestions of faces to merge under the tag for that person or pet.

Google has added a new Love Story auto movie creation feature in the latest update to Google Photos.  Like the other auto created movies, the Love Story feature is driven by Google Assistant which is deeply integrated into Photos.  The update to bring this new feature is a combination of an app update, to version 3.23.0.200631752 for those keeping score at home, and a cloud-side update that is pushed to this updated app version.

To get to the new Love Story feature, open up Google Photos then use the overflow menu (three vertical dots) to create a new movie.  There you will see all of the different auto generated movie options along with the new Love Story.

Google Photos is the latest Google service to receive a Progressive Web App treatment.  With the release of Chrome 67, you can now install Photos onto your Windows, MacOS or Linux computer and have an app-like experience in a web page.

For those that are new to Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs, they are web-based versions of an app but they act like a full fledge version of that app.  The idea is to get a touch friendly app experience without having to actually install anything.

Believe it or not, Google Photos is now three years old.  The photo library app that syncs photos with your Photos online storage, continues to evolve rapidly and remains one of the most popular Google apps out there.  It makes keeping a sync’d copy of your photos and videos online pretty seamless and if you use the High Quality sync setting, doesn’t even consume any of your Google Drive quota (which is great for photos under 16MP).

Photos was announced as part of the original Pixel launch and those devices, as well as the subsequent Pixel 2 lineup, can store photos in original quality without using Drive space.  Other devices can upload in original too, but you start using up your storage.  It was also one of the first apps that has a serious AI integration from Google, with the app able to identify people, pets and look at the overall quality of the photo to recommend automatic improvements (referred to commonly as Auto Awesome), make animations and movies, and create photo books of your favorite photos.

It has been a long time coming but Google Photos is finally going to give you the ability to mark photos in your library as favorites.  The new features, which the Google Photos team announced via Twitter, is a cloud-side update and will be rolling out to all accounts throughout this week.  Once you have it, you will be able to view a photo and will see a small star icon as you view that photo.  Tap that star, that photo gets marked as a favorite.

As part of this feature, there will now be a new Favorites album in the menu and in your Albums view in Google Photos.  That way you will be able to quickly find them in your library.

At Google I/O last week, we got a glimpse of new one-touch auto fixing of photos that would be coming to Google Photos both in the app and on the web.  It seems that those auto fix suggestions are now starting to roll out.

Leveraging AI, Photos will now pop up a small banner on a photos to suggest a fix for that photo.  The AI looks at the lighting quality, orientation and content of the photo and gives you the suggested fix.  Tap the pop-up and you open a simple editor which shows you the updated photo.  Long press the photo to see the original.  If you like the suggested fix, save it and your photo in your Google Photos library is updated.