Google Photo’s new Live Albums are limited to only 10,000 images, which won’t be enough

Following the Made by Google event earlier this month Google started to roll-out Live Albums in Google Photos, a new feature that lets the Assistant automatically create albums of your favourite people and pets. Now that the Google Home Hub has started rolling out and people are using the feature en masse, a big limitation with Live Albums has come to light, you can only have a maximum of 10,000 images in each album.

The limit on images has been confirmed by the Google Photos social media team, who further clarified that there is a limit of 10,000 images or videos for private folders, or 20,000 images or videos for shared folder.

The issue has come to light with several people reporting that their Live Folders have been notifying them that their Live Albums have been paused and that they can no longer add more photos. It’s not a limited amount of people with several users reporting on the Google Product Forum that they have already hit the barrier after only several days of use.

10,000 images you say, that’s more than enough! Sure for any single album 10,000 images are a lot, however if you’re like many families these days you’ve probably amassed over 10,000 images of each of your kids, and if you’re into selfies who knows how many images you have. I created two albums using just 2 members of my family and I was surprised to find that I’m almost at the 10,000 photo limit.

The first two albums there Team and Smart album were both created for my Google Home Hub and as you can see it won’t take too many new images being added to my Google Photos stream for that album to become “full” thanks to the auto updating of these albums. This is actually an issue that needs fixing, some users are already getting popups warning their Live Album is paused.

One potential fix could be for Google to allow users to restrict images to a certain date range, or have a first in first out option where old photos are automatically removed as new ones are put in? Another workaround for Home Hub or Lenovo Smart display users is to use the Recent Highlight Album option that’s available via the Google Home App.

Found in the ambient mode settings the recent highlights will automatically pull together a slideshow of your recent images, however this will not let you restrict those images to just the people and pets you want to see, and it seems to only be accessible via the Home App interface.

I currently have 2 Google Home Hubs ready to give to my parents as Christmas gifts, the idea was to create a Live Album of all of the grand kids, have those images automatically updated using the partner share feature from my brothers and I, and there you go magic automatically updating family photo frames. This 10,000 image limit kills that idea and likely many others like it. Hopefully there’s not restrictions that prevent Google from lifting this limit in the near future.