Skip to main content

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

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.

Recommended Videos

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. 

Christian de Looper
Christian de Looper is a long-time freelance writer who has covered every facet of the consumer tech and electric vehicle…
Google just launched these 5 new features for your Android phone
The display on the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL.

Google is bringing a handful of new features to Android phones, including tools to keep users safe during a natural disaster, enhancements to accessibility using AI, and easier music discovery. Simultaneously, the company has reached a critical milestone with Android 15, pushing it closer to its public release in the coming weeks.
Keeping users safe during earthquakes

Google says its remarkable earthquake alert system is now available to users across all American states and territories. It plans to reach the entire target base within the next few weeks. Google has been testing the system, which also relies on vibration readings collected from a phone’s accelerometer, since 2020.

Read more
Google is about to make it a lot easier to customize your Pixel phone
A person holding the Google Pixel 8.

When you first set up a phone, it's essentially the same as every other phone. Customizing it to suit you is part of the fun. Google looks to be making this process a lot easier with a redesigned "Wallpaper & style" page for Pixel phones and tablets.

The news comes courtesy of Android Authority, which first discovered the updated wallpaper app in the Android 15 QPR1 beta (with a full release expected in December).

Read more
Google Messages is about to make finding group chats so much easier
Google messages versus samsung messages app icons side by side on Galaxy Z Fold 5.

For all its utility, Google Messages has been missing one big feature: the ability to easily search for group chats and send a new message to them. That's about to change. Users running the Google Message beta (version 20240820_00_RC00) can test this feature for themselves, but it's not yet available for everyone.

When you start a new conversation, the "To" field displays your contacts. Before this beta, the field would display only individual people. Even if you had an existing group chat, you wouldn't be able to send a message straight to it from the new message screen. The new feature means you can look for specific group names and participants; in addition, it displays the last message sent to the group.

Read more