Google Photos begins rolling out new sharing features this week

Jos

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Google Photos is getting a lot smarter. At the I/O conference last month, the tech giant unveiled several new additions to its app, including suggested sharing and shared libraries. The features are meant to make Google Photos a more social experience by encouraging you to share photos with contacts that appear in them rather than keeping them only on the device that took them.

The new features are starting to rollout this week. With Suggested Sharing, Google uses facial recognition to identify people in a picture from your list of Google Contacts and will show you a carousel of images that you might want to share based on who appears in them, but also taking into account whether it’s someone you interact with often.

The mobile app will have a new “Sharing” tab in the bottom right corner, providing a centralized view of pictures and videos that have been shared with you, as well as the ones that you’ve sent out. The same Sharing section is found to the left-hand navigation column on the web.

Suggested Sharing can even pick out the best shots taken at a particular event, and if a suggested person doesn’t have the app, Photos can send an SMS notification instead. Of course, users have the last say on what gets shared as they’ll have the option to review them before sending.

Meanwhile, Shared Libraries is geared towards families and very close relationships. You can choose to share entire albums or just part of one with another person. For instance, parents could have Photos automatically share any pictures taken of their children. They will automatically sync on each of their devices with the option to save them to local storage.

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This is much needed, though it doesn't address how it shares.

At the moment if you share something with someone, anyone who has the link for the shared "library" is able to look into whatever is inside, even if you don't share it with anyone else. This is the default sharing behaviour today, which makes sharing a pain in the behind if you are conscious about getting those pictures into the public (Someone could make a small script that will look for shared pictures using random strings).
 
Something that will go completely unnoticed and unused by me. Whenever I share a photo (which is very seldom) I simply send the recipient a link via WhatsApp.
 
I can confirm that I got the new layout, the links are still publicly available to anyone who gets it (Try opening the link with an incognito window).
 
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