Skip to main content

Snap, snap, hooray! Google Photos doubles Live Album limit to 20,000 images

Catching up with family and friends this holiday season likely means an uptick in smartphone activity as you snap numerous photos for future reminders of fun meetings and fleeting moments.

So it’s excellent news, then, that Google Photos has chosen to double the capacity of its Live Albums to 20,000 images, meaning that unless you’re a particularly prolific shooter, it should be a while yet before you run out of storage. It also means the limit now equals that of Google Photos’ shared albums.

Recommended Videos

You you can turn any of your albums into a Live Album simply by choosing the people — and pets — that you want to see in it. Google’s machine learning smarts — in other words, its object-recognition technology — will then automatically populate the album with those subjects when you snap them.

“Then, you can share your album with family and friends so they can be a part of special moments as they happen — no manual updates needed,” the web company said when it launched the feature for Android, iOS, and the web in October 2018.

Presumably, the folks at Google were prompted to increase the capacity of Live Albums after noticing how quickly people’s albums were filling up. With the limit now at 20,000, users should feel less pressured to go in and delete images to save space. But over time, it’s still likely that there will come a point where your Live Album reaches capacity, at which point you can simply create a new one with the same parameters.

Details of the increase in capacity showed up in an update on a Google Photos support page, and was spotted this week by Android Police.

Other recent updates for Google Photos include the addition of depth editing that lets you adjust the level of background blur to create more striking portraits.

Google Photos has come a long way since its launch in 2015 and is now widely regarded as one of the best photo storage and photo-sharing services available.

If you’re an avid smartphone photographer, then take a moment to check out Digital Trends’ handy tips on how to take better photos with such a device. But it’s best that you stay away from erupting volcanoes.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Your Google Photos app is about to look different. Here’s what’s changing
The Google Photos app on the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold.

Google is implementing a small yet significant change to its popular Google Photos app. As first noted by 9to5Google, the app's "Memories" tab is being removed. Memories is an auto-organizing, scrapbook-like feature that utilizes artificial intelligence to create an AI-powered feed.

Since its release, the Memories tab has been in the bottom bar of the Google Photos app. The Memories tab is being replaced by Moments, which will reside inside the app's Collections tab. This is where you can find People & pets, Albums, Documents, and Places.

Read more
Google’s Ask Photo feature is available for users that joined a waitlist
Google's Ask Photos debut.

Google has been on a roll lately with updates that make its platform dramatically more user-friendly than before, and one of the most impressive of these is the new Ask Photos feature in Google Photos. The feature has been hinted at for the better part of a year, but the official announcement came at the beginning of September, when interested fans could sign up for a waitlist. According to the folks at 9to5Google, those early adopters might now have the feature available to them.

Ask Photos is a Gemini-powered tool that uses text prompts to search your photo library. If you have thousands of photos saved to the cloud, this feature makes it possible to find a specific image without scrolling for hours.

Read more
Gemini Live, Google’s futuristic AI feature, is now free to use
A demonstration of Gemini Live on a Google Pixel 9.

Gemini Live, one of Google Gemini's more exciting features, will soon be available to Android users for free. The Google Gemini team announced the important news on X. The tool was previously only available through a Gemini Advanced subscription.

Gemini Live provides access to a Gemini AI chatbot, allowing you to have natural, free-flowing conversations with the AI using your voice instead of typing. Think of Gemini Live as your new digital best friend on your mobile device. It is capable of answering questions, assisting with homework, helping you plan trips abroad, and much more.

Read more