Right now, if you tap the share icon in Google Photos, you’ll be greeted with a slew of apps you have installed, like Facebook Messenger, your default texting app, Gmail, and more. The new update focuses on making sharing more personal, because it adds a layer of people from your contacts above the array of apps.
It’s actually a feature that came to Android via 6.0 Marshmallow called Direct Share. The people you most frequently contact will appear at the top, and if they use Google Photos, the shared images will appear in their app and they will receive an app notification. If they’re not, you can choose to send it to them via email or SMS — it sends the recipients a link to the shared photos.
The update also introduces “creative concepts” for the short movies the Assistant in the app helps create. Before, the app would stitch videos and photos together with some music and deliver it to you once you come back from a trip. Now, Google is attempting to make these videos more streamlined — based of specific concepts.
The first one that will be available is “They grow up so fast,” which complies the best photos of your kids stored within the app to create a mini-movie of them growing up.
These are basically planned around events like a trip to France, but also created after holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and more.
More concepts will be added, for example, “Summer of Smiles” coming on Thursday, will stitch together all your best moments from the summer; and “Special Day” will create a movie from photos of recent weddings, birthdays, and other celebratory days. You don’t need to do anything to activate these movies once they become available; Google’s Assistant does it all.
