Google today announced an upgrade for its popular Google Photos application, which is now being used by 500 million people every month. The app now has a new social feature called Suggested Sharing, which uses facial recognition to suggest which photos you should send to your friends and family. Another option called Shared Libraries will allow you to automatically share either all your photos or a subset of your photos with specific people – like a best friend or partner – for example.
The company also announced it will offer photo books and will integrated Google Lens into Google Photos.
Suggested Sharing is a lot like the functionality today included in Facebook’s standalone private sharing app, Facebook Moments.
The Google Photos app will identify who from your Google Contacts is in your photo, and then give you a nudge to share your photos with them from the app.
Google’s Anil Sabharwal showed how this feature would work during an onstage demo at Google’s developer conference, Google I/O.You’ll be able to see all your sharing activities and Google Photos’ sharing suggestions in a new Sharing tab, which will roll out on Android, iOS and web in the coming weeks, the company says.
A second feature called Shared Libraries is designed to make it easier to share with the select people in your life who you’re very close with – like a family member, best friend or partner.
In the Google Photos app, you’ll be able to turn on a setting that will automatically share photos with these designated contacts. But you don’t have to share your entire library, says Sabharwal. Instead, you can choose toggle on a feature that lets you only share photos containing a particular individual (or multiple persons).
Google will offer both 7-inch softcover or 9-inch hardcover books, and Google Photos will pick 40 photos it thinks are the best. The softcover books will cost $9.99, while hardcover will cost $19.99. The books will be 20 pages long by default.
Additional pages will cost more – $0.35 for each added page on softcover books, and $0.65 on hardcover books.
Photo books will be available on the desktop starting now, and will arrive on iOS and Android next week.