One of Google Photos’ best features is getting a promotion today, with “Rediscover this day” moving from the Assistant tab into the main interface as “Memories”.
The Assistant has long offered a look back at photos from years past, and Google’s heard users’ feedback that they enjoy the feature, so the new Memories feature takes that and runs with it.
Rather than selecting one photo from years gone by, Memories lets you view multiple photos from “today” (& a few surrounding days) across multiple years, presented by year at the top of the Photos tab in a way that looks not-a-lot-unlike certain other apps’ “Stories” features.
When you tap into Memories (see what we’ve done there?), you can navigate between photos with a tap, and years with a swipe.
You can also jump directly to all the photos from a particular day, which jumps you to that day in your timeline rather than doing a search – given that Memories might cover multiple days this seems fair enough.
Each individual photo from the Memory can be shared, although it looks like the Memory itself is only for your browsing. Still, that’s what Albums are for.
As time goes on, Google Photos holds more and more of our precious (and not so precious) memories. It’s great to see Google finding new ways to put these older photos in front of us.
Ready for a walk down memory lane? Take a look at your Google Photos app — it looks like Memories is in the process rolling out to users (around half the Ausdroid team has it showing up as of this morning). Hopefully it’ll be available to all, soon.
Mine updated, and then I removed Memories.