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Last year, Google Photos for mobile added arguably its best feature – the ability to ‘Explore’ your photos and videos in a more thoughtful and dynamic way. Using its machine learning and artificial intelligence, Google actively tags your content based on who or what appears in it, and when and where it was taken. You know, like we all used to do manually with Picasa (I don’t miss those days!)
Anyway, the Explore tab on mobile also allowed you to filter out your data based on its format. Animations, collages, ‘movies’, screenshots, selfies, videos, motion photos, and more all at the tap of a button. Now, at long last, the Explore tab is available on the web!
Additionally, the option to ‘star’ things in Google Photos traditionally adds them to the ‘Favorites’ section of the app. This too is now available on the web. It should make it much quicker to get to your best selfies – I mean, those adorable photos of your kids or pet that you can’t stop looking at.
What’s interesting about this update is that we continue to see Google bring feature parity to its web experiences that previously only existed in the apps. Google Photos, in particular, has shown hints of potentially working through the built-in Chrome OS file picker, and with a brand new photo and video editor built-in, it would be incredible to see all of this become available offline as a PWA one day.
If you’re not yet seeing these changes, sit tight – they’re not available across the board yet, but they are showing up for many users. Just use the button below to navigate to Google Photos and you will immediately see the new options on the left side of the screen.
Visit Google Photos on the web
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