Father’s Day is right around the corner, in case you didn’t know, and Google wants to help you celebrate in the best way possible — with mementos. On Thursday, Google Photos, Google’s pic-centric cloud storage service, launched a seasonal feature that automatically generates an album of a father and kids from a picture collection.
The feature is launching in earnest ahead of Father’s Day, and it’s similar to the Mother’s Day feature that rolled out earlier this year. Once you’ve navigated to the designated webpage (photos.google.com/fathersday) and signed into your Google account, you’ll be prompted to select photos of a dad you’d like to include in a video montage. From there, you’ll be prompted to pick the kids that will appear alongside him, and you can choose as many as you want. Once you’ve finished curating, clicking the “Go to Assistant” button will spit out the finished product, which can be saved from the Google Photos Assistant feed or shared via Twitter, Facebook, and other social channels.
Before you head on over to the Google Photos page, note that the Father’s Day feature isn’t available everywhere. Only regions that support Photo’s new Face Grouping, which uses machine learning to identify people, family members, and similar faces, will see the new webpage. And as of now, that list excludes the U.K., Europe, and Germany.
But there’s no denying that the Photos experience has improved for much of the world recently. In May, Google rolled out two new features: Suggested Sharing, which allows users to share snaps with friends as their taken, and Sharing, a new in-app options menu that serves up suggestions on how to share photos with friends and family. More recently, Google launched Photo Book, a paid service that lets you select photos to have printed in a high-quality photo book.
Those are only the tip of the iceberg. Google Lens, a new service that uses AI to intelligently recognize a range of information including foreign languages and paintings, is baked into the latest version of Google Photos. AirPlay support lets you beam photos and albums to a plugged-in Apple TV. And AI-powered correction features automatically correct white balance, stabilize photos and videos, and generate collections.
For the privacy-conscious, there’s an even better new enhancement: private archiving. In the newest version of the Google Photos app for iOS and Android, opening or long-pressing on a photo, tapping the menu button on the top right, and selecting “Archive” moves pictures to a separate folder accessible from the left-hand menu.
