Last month during its annual developer event Google IO, the company had unveiled a slew of new features across its entire range of services (We discussed them on talkingTech.) One of the most anticipated ones was suggested photo sharing and shared libraries.
The premise for this feature was very real. All of us take many photos on our phones everyday, many of which feature other people (selfie obsessed millennials take note). But we often forget to share these photos with them and even when we do, it’s often through services like WhatsApp that are not built for photo sharing and so reduce the image clarity and do not make it easy to integrate the shared photo with the receiver’s photo library. Enter Google Photos.
Shared Libraries lets you easily share select photos automatically with close contacts automatically. Say you want to share photos of your kids with your parents (grandparents can apparently never have enough photos of their grandchildren). All you have to do is select the ‘people’ whose photos should be shared (in this case the kids), select who it should be shared with (your parents) and that’s pretty much it. They will get an invite on their end and if they choose, they can automatically save those newly shared photos to their library. Any new and subsequent photos you take featuring your children will be automatically added to their library too. Neat huh?
Suggested Sharing is a related feature that identifies people in your photos (Google knows everybody) and then prompts you that you have photos featuring them and asks if you want to share it with them. Tap yes, and they get a prompt on their end and can add the photo to their library. I had a college reunion last weekend, and Google just bombarded me with prompts asking me to share the group photos with the people it recognized.
Suggested Sharing and Shared Libraries are rolling out on the web, Android, and iOS now. This is a staged roll-out so all users will not receive it at once, so you can expect it shortly if you don’t have it now.
Vinayak Nair is a self-confessed geek from the days when computer memory was measured in Kilobytes. I create YouTube videos on 3D Printing, DIY Projects, Everyday tech reviews and also delve into gaming.
