This is meant “to help people who have tons of photos and videos of their child or another kid in their life and little time to organize them”, a Google spokesperson told me. If you want to send it to someone that uses Google Photos, they’ll get a notification, but if you share to someone else – for example, a Windows phone user – that can be sent via SMS or email.
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In addition to the new Share functionality, Google is also updating the automatic creation feature in Google Photos. As an example, it showed off the concept movie posted below comprised of images from a young girl’s childhood.
Since the day it launched, one of Google Photos’ more compelling features has been its automatically generated montage videos. Today Google is adding better ways to share, as well as introducing new automatically created “concept” movies.
Let’s hope it works better than the Moments app Facebook released a year ago, which was recently the subject of controversy when it designed a disturbingly chipper movie composed of a user’s auto accident photos. “But we’re also making movies that span months and days”.
In the new update, which you will see in the video above, Google has turned the sharing functionality into a people-sharer, instead of an app-sharer. Look out for a concept to commemorate the good times from this summer, and another one for formal events like weddings.
There are two ways to now share images in Google Photos.
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All of these features are hitting Android, iOS, and the web today. Google Photos already offered the concept of shared albums that multiple people could contribute to. Now when selecting photos to share, you can bypass the idea of sharing to a specific app and just send to specific people instead – the share sheet will now just have a “To:” field where you can type names, email addresses or phone numbers. Now with the app, if you go on a trip, for example, shortly after you come back you may see a movie that was automatically made from some of the photos and videos you took while away. You can also grab the app below. It’s rolling out now, so check your device for updates in Google Play.
