Skip to main content

New Google Photos feature can generate a Father's Day album for you

google photos low resolution video update albums 2
Father’s Day is right around the corner, in case you didn’t know, and Google wants to help you celebrate in the best way possible — with mementos. On Thursday, Google Photos, Google’s pic-centric cloud storage service, launched a seasonal feature that automatically generates an album of a father and kids from a picture collection.

The feature is launching in earnest ahead of Father’s Day, and it’s similar to the Mother’s Day feature that rolled out earlier this year. Once you’ve navigated to the designated webpage (photos.google.com/fathersday) and signed into your Google account, you’ll be prompted to select photos of a dad you’d like to include in a video montage. From there, you’ll be prompted to pick the kids that will appear alongside him, and you can choose as many as you want. Once you’ve finished curating, clicking the “Go to Assistant” button will spit out the finished product, which can be saved from the Google Photos Assistant feed or shared via Twitter, Facebook, and other social channels.

Before you head on over to the Google Photos page, note that the Father’s Day feature isn’t available everywhere. Only regions that support Photo’s new Face Grouping, which uses machine learning to identify people, family members, and similar faces, will see the new webpage. And as of now, that list excludes the U.K., Europe, and Germany.

But there’s no denying that the Photos experience has improved for much of the world recently. In May, Google rolled out two new features: Suggested Sharing, which allows users to share snaps with friends as their taken, and Sharing, a new in-app options menu that serves up suggestions on how to share photos with friends and family. More recently, Google launched Photo Book, a paid service that lets you select photos to have printed in a high-quality photo book.

Those are only the tip of the iceberg. Google Lens, a new service that uses AI to intelligently recognize a range of information including foreign languages and paintings, is baked into the latest version of Google Photos. AirPlay support lets you beam photos and albums to a plugged-in Apple TV. And AI-powered correction features automatically correct white balance, stabilize photos and videos, and generate collections.

For the privacy-conscious, there’s an even better new enhancement: private archiving. In the newest version of the Google Photos app for iOS and Android, opening or long-pressing on a photo, tapping the menu button on the top right, and selecting “Archive” moves pictures to a separate folder accessible from the left-hand menu.

Editors' Recommendations

Kyle Wiggers
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kyle Wiggers is a writer, Web designer, and podcaster with an acute interest in all things tech. When not reviewing gadgets…
Google gives Maps’ Immersive View a boost and adds a new vibe feature
An aerial view of London on Google Maps.

Google is continuing its never-ending work of enhancing Maps, with four new updates coming to the app on Wednesday.

First up, the team has been working to expand the coverage of Immersive View. Google started rolling out the feature in July, offering remarkably detailed 3D fly-arounds of famous landmarks and layering it with useful information such as the weather, traffic conditions, and the general busyness of the area. It can do this for the current time or, by examining historical trends, for a future date. Immersive View will also let you zoom in from an aerial view right into, say, a restaurant of interest, at which point the software flips to Street View in order to take you right inside, if the imagery is available.

Read more
This new Google Lens feature looks like it’s straight out of a sci-fi movie
google lens ar translate news  2

Google has introduced AR Translate as part of a trio of updates for Google Lens that are aimed at taking image translation further into the future. The company held a demonstration at the Google Search On 2022 conference on Wednesday to show that AR Translate can use AI to make images featuring a foreign language look more natural after text is translated to another language.

Currently, any text that's converted into a different language uses colored blocks to mask bits of the background image. AR Translate better preserves the image by removing the blocks and just swapping the text outright to make the translated image look as though it was the original photo.

Read more
Google’s new privacy tool lets you know if your personal info was leaked
A Google presenter announcing alerts for personal info.

Google has just announced the expansion of its upcoming privacy tool. Made to protect your personally identifiable information (PII) from being too easy to find, the "Results About You" tool was first announced in May 2022. It will soon begin rolling out to a wider audience, and once it's out, you'll be able to easily request the removal of your personal data.

Now, at Search On 22, Google shared that it will be expanding this tool with an additional useful feature -- the ability to set up alerts if, and when, your PII appears on the web.

Read more