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Google’s annual I/O keynote overnight packed lots of announcements and updates, many of which will change the way you search and how you use your Android phone. And some of most tangible changes relate to the way you experience memories in Google Photos.
The memories feature has been sorting photos and videos by people, places and dates for years, presenting regular galleries and animations for you to reminisce over. And now, it’s going to use machine learning to find connections between objects, shapes and patterns.
One Google engineer testing the new AI-powered memories features was served a package of photos all about their backpack.
The new features were partly driven by a desire to make the memories feature smarter and more diverse, but also by the fact that — according to Google — 66 per cent of photos are never looked at again after they’re taken. By identifying patterns and linking photos together into memories, you might end up looking back on moments you otherwise wouldn’t, or even discover something you never realised about yourself.
So if you travel everywhere with a particular backpack, as one Google engineer did, or take lots of photos of a teddy bear in various places, you’re going to be served memories bringing all of those photos together. Or maybe you inadvertently take lots of photos of round things, or always look for triangles, or plaid; you’ll get memories of those too.
My favourite new memory feature builds on the current Cinematic Photos format. There will now be Cinematic Moments, which will take advantage of all the other photos you take while trying to get the perfect shot, turning two or more photos from the same moment into a short video.
All those not-quite-right photos you took trying to get the perfect shot can be analysed to create short videos.
Perhaps more useful though is the improved ability to not see certain memories, photos and people. You could already filter out certain people, pets or dates to prevent opening up old wounds. But Google has recently been working with GLAAD to understand particularly why some trans people might want to hide certain photos from their memories, and how best to do that in a respectful and non-triggering way.
It’s now possible to remove single photos from a memory, rename memories, and remove them entirely from the grid, which is huge not just for the trans community, but also for anyone who’s had a bad breakup or suffered a traumatic loss.
Finally, there’s another feature many people have been asking for: a locked folder. Photos in the locked folder won’t come up in memories and you can choose to put in a password to access them.