Google opted to celebrate this year’s National Pet Day by launching a range of new features for its Google Photos app. The functionalities added to the popular mobile and browser tool include a pet photo book, movie creator service, improved breed identification capabilities, enhanced search performance, and labels. The latter feature is by far the least “smart” addition to Google Photos, being delivered in the form of a simple tool that allows you to manually label photos of your pets with custom terms that the app can later take into consideration when responding to your search queries. You can hence e.g. place a “Hachiko wearing a hat on the beach” label on an image and either ask the Google Assistant to search for some or all of those terms in your photo library or do so yourself via text input directly from Google Photos.
The new photo book service is powered by Google’s machine learning and has been specifically designed to automatically pick what it believes are the best photos of your pet(s) worthy of being included in such a collection. Google Photos users in the United States and Canada are able to order a physical compilation of images picked by the system that can be customized with manual inclusions or exclusions, and can choose between both softcover and hardcover books. The service is going live this week but it’s presently unclear whether Google has any immediate plans to introduce it to more countries. Pet owners are now also able to search for images of their furry friends by species, breed, and even emoji, with the feature presently rolling out on a global level.
Tapping the movie button from the Assistant tab found in Google Photos will now also allow you to create a “Meow Movie” or “Doggie Movie,” Google says. Both solutions have already been available to select users for nearly ten months but the company is now allowing everyone to take advantage of them manually, provided their photo libraries have enough content for a music video starring their pet to be created. The same goes for the Google Lens-powered breed identification service which has been in testing since last year and should now be available on a global level, with its initial version being able to recognize dogs and cats.