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

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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.

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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)…
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