Google Photos Takes on Apple Photos' Memories With Creative Concepts
A week after the release of Apple’s revamped Photos app in iOS 10, Google has come out with a significant update to Google Photos, seemingly to remind users that its acclaimed app remains the photo and video sharing and storage service to beat.
Sharing to people, not apps
Google understands that amid the plethora of apps and services that are available to people, sharing photos with friends can be more complicated than it seems. As the company points out, “Not everyone uses the same apps, texting can be slow, and email has attachment limits.”
And so Google has restyled the sharing process in Google Photos so that people now take precedence over apps. Take a look:
Previously, when initiating sharing of photos in the app, the native iOS share sheet was brought up, whereupon an app had to be selected through which the sharing might proceed. Now, after selecting the photos you want to share and tapping the share icon, you’re prompted to select the people you want to share the photos with or else enter their names, phone numbers, or email addresses.
Google Photos will then notify the recipients accordingly.
If your friends are on Google Photos, they’ll get a notification. If you share via phone number, they’ll get a link to the photos and videos via SMS. And email addresses will get an email with a link from Google Photos. So you can spend less time toggling from app to app to share photos — dealing with failed texts or email attachment limits along the way — and more time enjoying life’s photo-worthy moments.
- GoogleCreative concepts
Since its launch over a year ago, Google Photos has been automatically making movies of recently uploaded photos. Now, with its latest update, it goes one better with automatically generated movies based on what Google calls “creative concepts,” or “the kinds of movies you might make yourself, if you just had the time.”
Similar to the automatic creations of the Memories feature introduced in Apple’s Photos app in iOS 10, Google Photos’ creative concept movies are built around certain themes and aren’t limited to recently uploaded photos. In fact, the first creative concept is designed to show the growth of a child through the years in a series of photos, as seen in this example:
More creative concepts will be rolled out over time, including a summer-themed one and another that’s suited for weddings and other formal events.
Get Google Photos
These new features are coming to Google Photos for iOS via an update today.
You can download Google Photos for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad from the App Store for free.
Download Google Photos
About a couple of weeks ago, Google Photos was updated to version 2.0 with advanced stabilization and rendering to make Live Photos smoother. That technology was originally used in Motion Stills, an app released by Google in June to enable users to create animated GIFs out of Live Photos.
Download Motion Stills