Google Photo Books, Suggested Sharing, and Shared Libraries Announced

Google Photos is one of the company’s best products in recent years. The service offers the ability to upload unlimited high quality photos, though storage space is limited for full-resolution photos. But for the vast, vast majority of casual users out there, Google Photos is, in my opinion, the absolute best way to save all of your photos. Not only that, but the various smart AI technologies that Google uses to organize your photos makes it a blast to take a whole bunch of pictures and not have to deal with sorting through massive albums yourself.

Today, at Google I/O, the company announced 3 new ways to share in Google Photos: Photo Books, Suggested Sharing, and Shared Libraries.

Photo Books

For many of us, photo books are important ways we hold on to memories of yesteryear. Although many of us now use online services such as Google Photos in order to memorialize our lives, a lot of our photos come before the advent of free/cheap online photo hosting services.

But still, it’s useful to have a physical, hard copy of your photos. Even better is to have them bound in a book that will always sit on your shelf so you can share it with your friends and family years down the road. To that end, Google is introducing Google Photo Books. Once you select your best photos (Google will help by removing duplicates and poor quality photos), the software will create a Photo Book that you can actually purchase.

Photo Books are rolling out today for users in the U.S. using the web version, and to the Android and iOS versions of the app in the coming week. Photo Books will start at $9.99 for a 20-page softcover book and $19.99 for a hardcover book. Sometime later, Google Photos will also be able to suggest Photo Books for you based on recent trips or events.

Suggested Sharing

Even though Google Photos has already made sharing photos and videos incredibly easy, the onus is still on us to remember to actually share them with our friends and family. Unfortunately, many people (myself included) often forget to do so. That’s why Google is working to take us out of the picture by creating reminders of photos to share. Not only that, but Photos will even automatically select the photos and the contact that they recommend you share with.

Shared Libraries

Next, Google is introducing an enhancement to the way we share photos with specific people. Before, you would create a Shared Album with another person, say your wife, in order to add photos of your kids to. But now with Shared Libraries, Google will automatically add photos to a library with that person. You can go beyond and share your full photo library, or only photos of certain people or from a certain date onwards. Each photo that you receive can be saved to your own library so they will show up in search and be available to the Photo Assistant for cool movies, collages, and more.

Google Lens

As we reported previously, Google Lens is coming to Google Photos. During the demo, we can see Lens being used to search objects in pictures, and even select certain text such as phone numbers in order to place a phone call immediately.

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We’ll be continually covering more of the news from Google I/O. Stay tuned to the XDA Portal feed for more!

Source: Google

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