Nice work from my old crew:

With the update that starts rolling out today, you’ll see more videos — including the best snippets from your longer videos that Photos will automatically select and trim so you can relive the most meaningful moments. Even your still photos will feel more dynamic thanks to a subtle zoom that brings movement to your memories. And to bring it all together, next month we’ll start adding instrumental music to some Memories.

Happily, they’ve finally built a subset of the collage editor I spec’d out eight years ago (🧂🤷🏼).

Also,

Soon, you’ll begin to see full Cinematic Memories that transform multiple still photos into an end-to-end cinematic experience, taking you back to that moment in time. Cinematic Memories will also have music, making your photos feel a little more like a movie.

TL;DR: High quality storage will no longer be unlimited, but this won’t happen for a while; free storage remains a generous 15GB (more than enough for most people); and 100GB of storage costs two bucks a month.

Beginning June 1, any new photo or video uploaded in High quality in Google Photos will count toward your free 15 GB storage quota or any additional storage you’ve purchased as a Google One member. To make this transition easier, we’ll exempt all High quality photos and videos you back up before June 1. This includes all of the High quality photos and videos you currently store with Google Photos. Most people who back up in High quality should have years before they need to take action—in fact, we estimate that 80 percent of you should have at least three years before you reach 15 GB. You can learn more about this change in our Google Photos post.

Overall the app is now organized into three tabs. Notably:

As part of the new search tab, you’ll see an interactive map view of your photos and videos, which has been one of our most-requested features since we launched Google Photos. You can pinch and zoom around the globe to explore photos of your travels…

In addition, the “Stories”-style strip up top is getting upgrades:

We’re adding more types of Memories, like the best pics of you and your closest friends and family over the years, trips, and even just the highlights from last week… We’ve also moved our automatic creations–like movies, collages, animations, stylized photos and more–from the “For you” tab (which is now gone) and into Memories.

It’s always been easy to create a sharable link for your albums, but it wasn’t possible to prevent others from resharing that link. Now Photos offers more control:

Last December, we launched direct sharing to make it easy to share one-off photos and videos in Google Photos by adding them to an ongoing, private conversation in the app. Today, we’re bringing a similar experience to shared albums. Rolling out this week, when sharing an album, the default option will be to share with a specific person or people via their Google account. This gives you more control over who’s added to the album.

“A man reminisces about the love of his life with a little help from Google.” 😢😌

If you’d like to try some of these things for yourself:

First you’ll need the Google Assistant.

00:12 “Show me photos of me and Loretta”
To use the Assistant to pull up photos, make sure you and your favorite people are tagged in your Google Photos. Then just say, “Hey Google, show me photos of me and [their name]”

00:21 “Remember, Loretta hated my mustache.”
To try this one, just say, “Hey Google, remember…” and then whatever you’d like the Assistant to help you recall later. Like “Hey Google, remember Dad’s shoe size is 8 and half” or “remember Maria loves lilies.” Then, to see everything you’ve asked the Assistant to remember, just say, “Hey Google, what did I tell you to remember?”

00:39 “Show me photos from our anniversary”
To see photos from a wedding, anniversary, birthday, or graduation, you’ll need a Google Photos account, and you’ll also need to tell your Assistant the specific date. Just say something like, “Hey Google, remember my anniversary is May 18th” or “remember Mark’s birthday is March 30th.” Then you can use that information in many ways, like “Hey Google, show me photos from our anniversary” or “Hey Google, remind me to buy flowers on Mark’s birthday.”

00:51 “Play our favorite movie.”
First, tell your Google Assistant what your favorite movie is by saying, “Hey Google, our favorite movie is Casablanca.” Once you’ve purchased your favorite movie on Google Play Movies or YouTube, all you have to say is, “Hey Google, play our favorite movie” and the movie will start playing.

[YouTube]

“Every app expands until it includes chat…” 🙃

Be that as it may, I’m happy to see Google Photos making it easier to share & converse directly with small groups:

Now when you share one-off photos and videos, you’ll have the option to add them to an ongoing, private conversation in the app. This gives you one place to find the moments you’ve shared with your friends and family…

You can like photos or comment in the conversation, and you can easily save these photos or videos to your own gallery. This feature isn’t designed to replace the chat apps you already use, but we do hope it improves sharing memories with your friends and family in Google Photos. This is gradually rolling out over the next week.

Bonus smart-ass response o’ the day:

Sometimes Google goes two or three months without launching a new messaging app and I get worried. So this news comes as a great relief https://t.co/QFz5Q7iye3

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) December 3, 2019

• You now have more control over album sorting on iOS & Android: “The default method is ‘Most recent photo,’ but you can now group by ‘Last modified’ or ‘Album title.’”
• Manual face tagging lets you identify people missed by the algorithm.
• Bonus: Starting now in Ireland & worldwide next year, Facebook will enable automatic Facebook->Photos import.

[Via John Lin & others]

I’m not kidding (or shilling for my employer) when I tell you that:

1. The 7” Google Nest Hubs in our kitchen & my parents’ kitchen are quite possibly the most popular items in the room.
2. Setting up an auto-populated photo stream of our & my brothers’ kids is easily our most indispensable use of Google Photos.
3. Seeing our kids on screen every day actually motivated my folks to come visit more frequently.

Now a new 10” sibling (with video chat!) has joined the product lineup, and it can do tons of stuff. Check it out:

[YouTube]

The Google Photos team is adding the ability to search for text in images, then copy & paste it. Stay tuned for details.

You spotted it! Starting this month, we’re rolling out the ability to search your photos by the text in them.

Once you find the photo you’re looking for, click the Lens button to easily copy and paste text. Take that, impossible wifi passwords 😏

— Google Photos (@googlephotos)

August 22, 2019

🎉🎉🎉

Google product teams aspire to “three-comma moments” (i.e. reaching 1,000,000,000 users); congrats to Photos for reaching joining this rarefied club!

Aiming to extend Photos magic to even more people around the world, the team has introduced Gallery Go, a super lightweight app designed for offline use, especially on entry-level phones.

The Verge writes,

Gallery Go is a new app from Google designed to let people with unreliable internet connections organize and edit their photos. Like Google’s regular Photos app it uses machine learning to organize your photos. You can also use it to auto-enhance your pictures and apply filters. The difference is that Gallery Go is designed to work offline, and takes up just 10MB of space on your phone.

[YouTube]

It was powerful but confusing. The team writes,

Starting in July, new photos and videos from Drive won’t automatically show in Photos. Similarly, new photos and videos in Photos will not be added to the Photos folder in Drive. Photos and videos you delete in Drive will not be removed from Photos. Similarly, items you delete in Photos will not be removed from Drive. This change is designed to help prevent accidental deletion of items across products.

See also more detailed info as needed.

FWIW I bailed on this integration a long while back. Instead I now import images from my SLR & Insta360 to my Mac; edit/convert the selects to JPEG via Lightroom Classic & the Insta app; then drag the JPEGs into a photos.google.com in a browser window (so they’re grouped with my phone pics/vids); and finally back up the originals to an external HD. It’s not exactly elegant, but it’s simple enough and it works.

Just to confirm, as various friends have been asking:

Note that photos and videos backed up in Google Photos will not be deleted.

So after Google+ shuts down April 2, everything you see at photos.google.com will be safe & sound. As for stuff not in your Photos library:

• If you’ve shared an image on G+, that shared copy will be deleted. You can see all of those images in the Album Archive page.
• You can download your content before the April shutdown.

Hope this helps. If anything is unclear, please let me know!

Here’s a nice little gift for my fellow shutter-happy parents (of human and/or furry children): You can now include up to 20,000 images (up from the previous limit of 10,000) in a live album (i.e. one that automatically includes pics/vids of selected people & pets.

This is a timely godsend for my family, as my brother & I just gave our folks a Google Home Hub for Christmas, set up to automatically show photos of our kids. Between our families we quickly swamped the 10k limit, so this headroom is very timely. Thanks, team!

Come build for billions. 🙂

[YouTube]

This is kind of inside-baseball, but it’s exciting for the possibilities it opens:

If you want to build and test your own experience, you can visit our developer documentation to get started. You can also express your interest in joining the Google Photos partner program if you are planning a larger integration.

Among the things apps can now do:

• Easily find photos, based on
• what’s in the photo
• when it was taken
• attributes like media format
• Upload directly to their photo library or an album
• Organize albums and add titles and locations
• Use shared albums to easily transfer and collaborate

Been a long time in coming, but we’re getting there at last:

The Favorite (star) button will only appear on photos in your own library, allowing you to mark an individual item as a favorite which, in turn, will automatically populate a new photo album with just your favorite photos. […]

Meanwhile, the heart icon is Google Photos’ version of the “like.” This will appear only on those photos that have been shared with you from your family and friends.

The Photos team has shared five tips for doing more with your pet photos & videos. Highlights in brief:

1. A photo book of your pet, created just for you
2. Identify popular breeds with Google Lens
3. Create a movie dedicated to your furry friend
4. Label your pet to easily find photos of them
5. Search by breed and emoji

Start via this link, choose your sweetie & you, and hit Go. A short time later you’ll get a little movie styled according to the theme you chose, like this:

[YouTube]

You know how Google Assistant can say “Hey, [stateyourname], you should probably leave for the airport by 5 to make it in time for your 7 o’clock flight?” I want it to also say, “You know, it’s Mother’s Day on Sunday. Would you like this photo book to show up on your mom’s doorstep then together with some nice flowers?” Take my money, robot; make me into a better son!

Clearly such work involves a lot of moving parts & hard-to-define qualities (e.g. whether the memories evoked by an image are happy or sad may change greatly depending on things entirely outside the pixels). On the visual quality front, however, my teammates are making interesting progress. As Engadget writes,

If Google has its way, AI may serve as an art critic. It just detailed work on a Neural Image Assessment (NIMA) system that uses a deep convolutional neural network to rate photos based on what it believes you’d like, both technically and aesthetically. It trains on a set of images based on a histogram of ratings (such as from photo contests) that give a sense of the overall quality of a picture in different areas, not just a mean score or a simple high/low rating.

 Check out the Research blog for details on how it works.

“Dogs and cats clustered together—mass hysteria!” Google Photos can now search by breed (e.g. Maine Coon, Labrador), and it clusters pets alongside people:

When you want to look back on old photos of Oliver as a puppy or Mr. Whiskers as a kitten, you no longer need to type “dog” or “cat” into search in Google Photos. Rolling out in most countries today, you’ll be able to see photos of the cats and dogs now grouped alongside people, and you can label them by name, search to quickly find photos of them, or even better, photos of you and them. This makes it even easier to create albums, movies, or even a photo book of your pet.

Also, don’t forget to check your Assistant to see whether you’ve received a deliriously cornball-soundtracked pet movie. [Via] 

“Simpler, speedier and more reliable”—I can get behind that:

This new tool replaces the existing Google Photos desktop uploader and Drive for Mac/PC.

Backup and Sync is an app for Mac and PC that backs up files and photos safely in Google Drive and Google Photos, so they’re no longer trapped on your computer and other devices. Just choose the folders you want to back up, and we’ll take care of the rest.

Check out the help center if you need details—but generally it should be set it, forget it, get (optionally) free unlimited photo storage.

[Via]

Auto-hide (but don’t delete) pictures of receipts, whiteboards, etc.? Cool:

To help you quickly find and organize those photos you want to save but don’t necessarily want to often see among your memorable moments, beginning today you may see a suggestion in the Assistant tab with pre-selected photos to help you quickly archive these photos. You can review the suggestions and remove any photos you don’t want archived, and tap to confirm when you’re done.

You can also archive individual images anytime. Select the photos you want to remove from the main gallery without deleting them from your library, just tap the three dots, and choose “Archive.”

You can find archived photos anytime under “Archive” in the left hand nav, view them in albums and find them via search.

This feature is rolling out today for both Android and iOS users as well as the desktop version of Google Photos. Check it out!

Doesn’t yet auto-suggest hiding pictures of exes. 😉

[Via]

Available today on iOS and Android:

Create and print photo books

• Beautiful hardcover and softcover books—perfect for every occasion.
• Make it in minutes, not hours, with automatic photo curation and easy customization.
• Made in the USA from premium, responsibly-sourced paper.

I can confirm from personal experience that the books are really nice. (My son Henry loves the one I made by searching for him + trains.) 

It’s not glamorous, but optimizing apps for low-bandwidth environments is critical to democratizing access to their benefits. Having traveled in Nepal, I can tell you that all the cool creations in the world don’t matter if you can’t even back up & share your photos.

With that in mind, Google Photos is rolling out some important updates:

Now your photos will back up automatically in a lightweight preview quality that’s fast on 2G connections and still looks great on a smartphone. And when a good Wi-Fi connection becomes available, your backed up photos will be replaced with high-quality versions. We’re also making it easier to share many photos at once even on low connectivity. Never mind if you’re at the beach or hiking in the mountains, with Google Photos you can now share pictures quickly even with a spotty connection by sending first in low resolution so friends and family can view them right away. They’ll later update in higher resolution when connectivity permits.

🌍💪

The image editor in Google Photos just got smarter about automatically adjusting the warmth and tint of your images, and you can try it out now on photos.google.com or on Android (iOS update to follow shortly). Meanwhile the team has put together six great tips for editing effectively in Photos.

Heh—I enjoyed this mental image from Fast Company:

With its new Photo Scan (Android, iOS) app, Google basically donned a leather motorcycle jacket, strutted into a party full of regular photo-scanning apps, knocked everyone’s drinks out of their hands, kissed the prettiest one straight on the mouth, and told the DJ to take a hike.

They go on to say,

If you’ve got old photos to digitize, this should be your first stop. The app is fast, accurate, and best of all, free. And it’s a complete no-brainer if you already store your snaps on Google Photos, as it’ll zing all your scans there automatically.

[YouTube]

So, now that you’ve downloaded PhotoScan & digitized a bunch of images, how can you give them proper dates? Here’s how:

On photos.google.com, just select the group of photos you’d like to adjust and click “Edit date & time” in the menu dropdown. You’ll be able to shift or set the time stamps, and preview the changes before saving.

Here’s a quick video demo (showing how to edit one image, but applicable to multiple simultaneously):

[YouTube]

The first batch of movie concepts (“the kinds of movies you might make yourself, if you just had the time”) that Photos introduced in September have been really well received, and now the team is rolling out more:

More automatic movies, made for you: baby’s first months, holiday traditions, highlights from the year, and more.

As before, just live your life, back up your pics, and keep an eye out for movies arriving via the Assistant in Photos.

[YouTube]