Google Photos redesigns its Memories feature with vertical swiping, more video and other creative tools

As consumer social apps shift their focus to video for social expression and adopt more creative tools, like those for collage-making, Google Photos’ often more utilitarian app will now do the same. The company today announced an upgrade to Google Photos and its app for mobile devices that will better highlight users’ videos, create visual effects with photos set to music, introduce its own collage editor and more.

The additions are a part of a larger upgrade to Google Photos’ Memories feature, first introduced in 2019.

A combination of something like Stories and Facebook’s Memories, Google Photos’ Memories similarly helps users look back at their older photos, organized into collections at the top of the app’s main screen — where Stories are often found in social apps. Last year, Google Photos upgraded Memories using machine learning technology to identify patterns across your photos and added other types of Memories, like those that highlighted things like events and holidays.

Now, Google is rolling out another redesign to Memories, which introduces more video into the experience.

The service will automatically select and trim the best snippets from your longer videos using machine learning as part of this enhancement, Google says.

The changes come at a time when tech companies are seeing increased use of video among users. Meta earlier this year said Reels was making up 20% of the time users spent on Instagram and video overall makes up 50% of the time users spent on Facebook, for example. Google Photos is seeing a similar trend. The company tells TechCrunch video uploads grew four times faster than photo uploads over the past two years, which is why it has chosen to invest in more video tools.

The updated version of Google Photos will also do more with music, including by adding music to more Memories and setting multiple still photos to music in its “Cinematic Photos” visual effect feature. Launched in 2020, Cinematic Photos leverages machine learning to create 3D versions of your photos by predicting the image’s depth, then animating a smooth panning effect. It later expanded this effect to include stitched-together photos it called Cinematic Moments, which also give an illusion of a more 3D-like image.

Sarah Perez

Consumer News Editor

Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.

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