Google Photos is one of the best new services that's come out of the search giant, and it just keeps gaining steam. At today's I/O 2017 keynote, Google announced that Photos has hit an incredible 500 million monthly users, and they're rolling out a handful of new features to try and build that number up even further.
Like everything else Google is working towards lately, these new features revolve heavily around machine learning and AI, like the Suggested Sharing and Shared Libraries feature that were both announced.
If you're in a group, you've probably taken a picture of everyone and then forgotten to send the photo out after the fact. Or maybe you were on the other end, and someone took a picture of you that never made its way to social media so you never saw it again. Bummer, right? Google's Suggested Sharing can fix that.
The Photos app will scan images for faces, and, if it recognizes one, will suggest sharing an image with the person in it. One tap, and voila, they have access to all of their pictures from last weekend regardless of whose photo it was shot on.
The other feature, called Shared Libraries, takes that one step further. You can pick someone (best friend, significant other, sibling, anyone) and Google will automatically share photos into their library. Yeah, that sounds a little invasive, but Google has some privacy controls to take care of that.
Not all photos will be shared with this person, unless that's specifically what you want. You can choose to only share photos after a certain date, or only photos with certain faces in them. In Google's example, a husband can automatically share photos with his wife if the pictures have their kids in them. It's an easy way to keep up with the tons of pictures without worrying about who is taking the pictures.
But perhaps the coolest feature Google rolled out with Photos is a new memory-making machine called Photo Books. It takes the smart albums concept of Google Photos and goes one step further by offering to create and mail you a physical copy of your pictures. You simply pick a set of pictures from a vacation, a wedding, or just a really good weekend, and Photos will automatically suggest the best photos out of that group and give you the option to buy a softback or hardback scrapbook of those best images. Pricing starts at just $9.99, too, which really isn't bad.
These features are set to roll out over the next couple of weeks.
Google I/O 2017 coverage presented by BESTEK
