Google Photos introduces a new AI-powered scrapbook feature for your memories

Google is no stranger as of late to injecting artificial intelligence into its products and services. Today, it takes another step into that new identity by introducing a new “Memories View” in Google Photos. This is an AI-driven, scrapbook-like timeline feature is designed to automatically curate and organize your photos and videos on your behalf. According to the Keyword blog post put out this morning, you’ll be able to easily relive, customize, and share your most memorable trips, celebrations, and daily moments with your loved ones.

The Memories carousel debuted four years ago and was a copy of Facebook’s own memories feature (which was stolen from Timehop) and is now being used by over half a billion people each month. This new Memories View extends and improves the original by giving you something much more akin to a traditional scrapbook without all of the work.

Once you receive this new view, which is at the bottom of the new app redesign, you can either save your favorite memories or create your own from scratch. Simply add or remove specific photos and videos, hide memories altogether, or customize them to your liking. You can also rename memories, or use the new AI-powered title suggestions.

Clicking ‘Help me title’ will automagically create a relevant title based on the images found within the scrapbook. If you don’t like it, you can just try again! It’s basically Google’s “Help me write” feature from Gmail and Docs, but baked into Google Photos now.

Lastly, you can co-author memories with friends or family who are invited. Perhaps someone who shared that memory with you. This is a lot like how you invite co-collaborators to add photos and videos into albums, but here, they’re tweaking memories.

Sidenote: It would make for a great sci-fi story if Neuralink and Google Photos were required storage for your actual memories. Someone could be arrested for altering your memories since it’s a service. Okay, now I’ve just gone off the deep end, but that would just be fiction…right?

Anyway, Google Photos is also soon adding the ability to share memories as videos. You’ll be able to send these to friends and family so they can watch them even if they’re not signed up for Photos. Memories View is currently rolling out in the U.S., and will be available worldwide in the next few months. Let me know if this interests you at all, and better yet, if you’re someone who keeps an actual scrapbook to date and has ideas for how to improve the digital version!