See your most memorable pictures with Google Photos new feature
Users can soon share photos and albums directly to contacts within the app.
Google Photos has added a new memories feature that's like a personalized social media highlight reel to bring your favorite photos back to the top of your feed and your mind.
The team behind the Google photo library and sharing app announced Thursday that the new feature will use machine learning to curate what appears in Memories.
"You’ll see photos and videos from previous years at the top of your gallery in a new feature we’re calling Memories. While you might recognize this stories format from social media, these memories are your personal media, privately presented to you so you can sit back and enjoy some of your best moments," Shimrit Ben-Yair, the director of Google Photos, said in a post about the announcement.
The layout shows circular thumbnail bubbles at the top of the screen, which will feel familiar to people who use Instagram stories. Users can tap to see a full screen carousel highlight of the memories along with the date and location from those featured photos.
Ben-Yair told ABC News the idea behind Memories was that Google Photos "wanted to help give you a digital version of a walk down memory lane of your personal media, by surfacing select photos and videos from previous years at the top of your gallery in Google Photos."
Instead of parsing through a photo stream to find the best quality picture, Google Photos uses AI technology to find "the best ones."
The app also added a new feature to make it easier to find photos. For example, if you were to search for the word "pizza" the app would use computer learning to identify all your photos that have the word or an image of pizza.
Additionally, Google Photos said it understands "that you might not want to revisit all of your memories, so you’ll be able to hide certain people or time periods, and you have the option to turn this feature off entirely."
With memories, users can also share photos directly to friends or family within the app.
Photos can be added to an ongoing, private conversation thread so all the shared photos are in one place that can be easily saved across iOS and Android.
The company also announced a new service to help bring memories off your phone and into your home.
"For any favorite photos you rediscover along the way, you can now order 4x6 photo prints directly from the app," Ben-Yair said.
Users can now print individual 4 by 6-inch photos directly from the Google Photos app and get same-day pick up at CVS Pharmacy or Walmart print centers. Prints start at just $0.25 per photo.
Google Photos allows unlimited photo and video storage for free, up to 16MP and 1080p, accessible from any phone, tablet, or computer on photos.google.