Facebook Moments may be available in Europe and Canada, but Google Photos isn’t going to take that sitting down, having launched a few new features of its own. In fact, it seems as though Google wants Photos to be a little more competitive with Moments, and has improved the social features of the app.
Perhaps the biggest change is that you can now finally add comments to individual photos and albums themselves that may have been shared with you, a feature that has sorely been missed in Photos up until now.
Of course, Photos is still missing a feature that other social platforms have — the ability to like a photo. So, album owners still won’t know if anyone really likes the photo of their pasta dish.
Another interesting new feature is “smart suggestions.” When an album is shared with you, Photos will now recommend photos that you might want to add to that album using data like photo dates and locations, assuming location services are enabled on your device. Obviously, you’ll only see these smart suggestions if Photos has some smart suggestions to make — if you don’t have any relevant photos, you won’t see any suggestions.
“No more searching for photos from last weekend’s birthday party and picking out the perfect ones — now you can add your best photos from the event in one tap,” said Google in a Google+ post.
In all honesty, the new features are great, but Google really is playing catch-up. iOS users have been able to share photos with friends since way back in 2012, and it took Google until December to do the same. Still, Google Photos has been a huge success, and it’s nice to see Google adding features that could be very useful to users.
The new features are available for the Google Photos iOS and Android apps, as well as on the web.
