latest
Google Photos is the most convenient digital means of storing and organizing your photos ever conceived by man, but there's just something about looking at printed pictures. Through July 26, Google is making it easier to wrap your grubby meat mitts around some physical memories by waiving shipping fees on its photo books and canvas prints.
If you're a Google Photos user, you probably know the app likes to highlight some of your best shots using AI, either by adding special effects to them or grouping them. Back in September, Google's popular service received the ability to automatically curate memories for you and added an option to print photos in a new Canvas offering. The company is now testing out a new service that can automatically print and mail the best photos you've taken every month.
As any Android enthusiast will know, Google loves testing new UIs and features on random users. Sometimes the changes are welcome, but other times... not so much. This latest addition to Google Photos falls into the latter category, because a dedicated Printing tab is something that nobody asked for.
A handy thing about being a giant corporation is that you're able to use one of your services to promote another. Google's been known to do this from time to time, and it's at it again: right now, Google Fi subscribers can snag a free Google Photos photo book.
There are many digital ways to consume our photos and memories these days — browsing on our phones, casting to a large TV, showcasing on a Smart Display like the Google Home Hub — but if you want physical copies of your pics to flip through and enjoy, you will need to print them. Google Photos offers a photo book service in several countries, and now it's expanding to 14 more in Europe.
Google Photos is fantastic for storing and organizing all your pictures, but there's something just neat about flipping through a paper photo album. The service has provided those since last year, but your options for customizing them were more or less limited to choosing which photos to include and whether you wanted a hard or soft cover. Now, you're able to customize the layout of each page for a more personalized album.
Beyond being your awesome digital photo archiver, Google Photos offers to print copies of your pics if you prefer to keep those memories in a physical album. After launching in May of 2015 in the US, Photo books expanded to seven more countries over time (Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain), and they're now reaching five more.
Google Photos is, for many, a life-changing product. It stores and organizes every photo you take in relatively high quality for free (or in original quality for free, if you're a Pixel user). There's still something to be said for printed photos, though, which makes the photo books Google offers a neat proposition. And now, residents of Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain are able to take advantage.
Google announced its Photos photo books back in 2017, but the service was initially only available in the US. Canada was added later in the year, and no other countries joined the list for about nine months. Earlier this week, photo books arrived in Germany, and today they're hitting the UK and France as well.
Google is rolling out plenty of updates today, including a new version of Photos. This update probably won't change much for most users, but if you're preparing a photo book, you'll now have the option to add captions to your shots. A teardown also reveals plans to support editing of stereoscopic images and there are a couple new types of suggestions that may pop up on some of your photos.
We're getting a new version of Google Photos today, and breaking from the recent theme, this one actually has a few changes, though most of them don't stand out all that much. It's now easy to search for Motion Photos with a convenient search category. There are new notifications related to Photos Books, plus the settings to turn them off. And if anybody is auto-sharing photos with you, there's now a shortcut for setting up the same arrangement with them.
The holidays are fast approaching, which means the opportunities to gather with family and share the past year's memories and make new ones will be aplenty. This makes now the perfect time for using Google's Photo books to print neat physical albums of your existing photos or to prepare for the impending holiday picturefest. And as it so happens, Photo books are now available in Canada as well.
Google began rolling out a new version of the Photos app this afternoon. It's not a particularly feature rich update, it appears to include just a convenient shortcut for notification channels and a promotion for free shipping on photo books. However, a teardown does add a bit more meat to this release as it foretells of some basic integration with Google Maps and some helpful wizards for building quality photo books.
Photo books were announced at Google I/O 2017 just three days ago, and could be ordered that same day - but on the web only. However, the feature was said to be rolling out to the Google Photos Android and iOS apps 'in the coming weeks.' It seems like that estimate was just a tad conservative, as it's already showing up in some people's Photos apps.
Google Photos is something many people use every day; the automatic backup feature is so convenient, and the free unlimited storage is a major selling point. At I/O 2017, Google unveiled three new features: Suggested Sharing, Shared Libraries, and photo books. All of these use Photos' excellent machine learning technology to group faces together.
No matter how easy or simple storing all your photos in the cloud is, some people prefer to have hard copies of their favorite memories. There is no shortage of services and companies that offer easy creation of photo books, but now Google Photos has the functionality built-in.