The Google Photos team continues to make the service better and better with each passing update. Today, the team announced that they are bringing commenting and smart suggestions to shared albums. For those of you that may not know, shared albums are albums of pictures that you’ve decided to share with the public, or with specific people. While Google Photos is mostly a private photo service, this allows you to share pictures from an event – like a family reunion – with other people. Now Google is bringing more features to Shared Albums, and making it a bit more social.
With this update, those that are able to join the album will now have the ability to add comments to photos, as well as the album itself. Similar to sharing an album on Google+ or Facebook. This is all done within the app, and those that aren’t able to join the album, won’t be able to comment. The other feature that Google has added is smart suggestions. Google explains that this feature will now show you suggestions “for the right photos to add” to the shared album. This makes it easier to add all of your photos to your album and you won’t need to search for photos from an event – no matter how long ago – to add to your album. You can add the best pictures from a particular event with just a tap.
Google says that this feature is rolling out to Google Photos on Android, iOS and the web right now. They also add that in order to see these new features in the app, you’ll need to be on the most up-to-date version. Which is v1.20 for Android and v1.10 for iOS. This is a new update for the Android version and should be available in the Play Store now. We also have a download link below for you to sideload onto your device.
Last year at Google I/O, Google decided to unbundle Google Photos from Google+. They also made quite a few changes to the service, which made it better. Google Photos can back up all of your photos in “high quality” which you have unlimited space for. But if you choose to do “original size” it’ll use up your 15GB of free storage that Google offers to everyone. Google Photos also has a slew of editing tools available inside the app and on the web.
Download: Google Photos v1.20