Google Photos puts machines to work with launch of new sharing options

Google has started rolling out Google Photos’s new sharing features, which they announced at the company’s I/O developer conference in May. The two new features—Suggested Sharing and Shared Libraries—put machine learning to the use and encourage the use of the app as more of a social experience instead of a backup tool for photos. Google used to use its virtual assistant to do things like turn photos into animations, collages; stylize photos; offer “throwbacks” to old photos; organize photos into album; and more. Now, it’s expanding its reach with these new functionalities.

Suggested Sharing, as was discussed before, will prompt you to share certain photos. It’ll identify people using facial recognition tech and artificial intelligence to understand who you usually share photos with. It can arrange photos based on a certain location and put these in a ready-to-share album. It’ll select the best photos and suggest people to share it with, too. But you can still edit it after it’s made its suggestions. Your contacts don’t even need to be on Google Photos to see the album. They can get the album via email.

Shared Libraries, on the other hand, lets you share an entire photo collection with someone else. You can configure this to share only selected photos. For example, photos of your children. Tech Crunch thinks this’ll be the largest use case for this feature as parents might want to compile photos of their children together. Those you share the library with can choose to save some or all the photos you shared into their Google Photos app and make them searchable there.

The update is now rolling out to iOS, Android, and web, and is expected to finish roll out early next week at the latest.