Google Photos makes it easier to share your shots, create physical photo books

By Christian de Looper May 17, 2017

google photos io 2017 news 54843350 ml — Dennizen / 123RF

With 500 million users, Google Photos is one of Google’s most-loved products. On Tuesday, the company announced that a number of new features that’ll come to the service “this week.”

Google’s making it much easier to share photos with your friends. “Suggested Sharing” lets users share photos with friends in real time, as they are taken. If you take a photo of a friend, for example, it will employ facial recognition and other artificial intelligence techniques to suss out that person’s identity and prompt you to share the photos with them.

Google Photos also now features a new tab at the bottom of the Photos user interface. Titled “Sharing,” it offers a number of suggestions on how to share photos with your friends and family and lets you review the photos that it recommends you share.

Google Photos can now automatically share pics and albums, too. If you would like your photo library to be shared with your significant other, for example, Google Photos can automatically update their Photos account every time you add new photos to it.

Google knows photos are not just digital and so it launched a new feature to help with that. Google Photo Books, which launched on Android and iOS in the United States earlier this year, lets you select photos and organize them to be printed into a nice-looking, high-quality printed photo book. Those books range from $10 to $20, depending on if you want a softcover or hardcover.

On top of those features, Google is also baking Google Lens into Photos. Google Lens is a newly launched service from the company that uses AI to intelligently recognize a range of different pieces of information. For example, you can point Lens at a sign in another language, and it will translate it for you. Point it at a painting, and you can get historical information about that painting.

The new Google Photos is available on iOS, the web, and Android.

Update: Added news that Google Photos sharing features are now available.

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Christian de Looper

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Christian’s interest in technology began as a child in Australia, when he stumbled upon a computer at a garage sale that he…

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