Google’s smart displays are continuing to grow in popularity, with new features and new models offered over the last year or two. Smart displays offer a lot of functions that can be accessed with a simple interface, and they’re much more engaging and interactive than the previous generation of voice-only home speakers. One of the functions I love on my Google smart displays is displaying memories from Google Photos, and there’s some new features coming here, too.
You can select albums that you want to display as a rolling slideshow throughout the day when the screen is on. I have chosen to have to show the photos of my family and special events in my life. But one thing that has been missing is some indication of when the photos were taken.
Android Police reports that some users are starting to see dates on photos.
While I haven’t seen this on my screens yet, an Ausdroid reader – thanks Dean – messaged me on with information about this and said:
It looks like dates don’t show for photos that were uploaded manually e.g. scanned and uploaded. The only photos I’ve had show dates so far are ones I took on my original Pixel and Pixel 2 – previous phones and subsequent phones aren’t working. Maybe this is because I used the unlimited upload at full resolution option on those devices? I’m now on a Samsung device.
Why there’s this discrepancy around which photos show capture date and which don’t is unclear; whether you upload “full size” photos from a compatible Pixel, or the “high quality” photos everyone else gets, the capture date information is always stored, so Google surely could display it if that were intended.
I guess when the feature becomes a little more widely available we’ll have a better idea of what works here and what doesn’t.
