Relive your best memories with new features from Google Photos

As a mom of three, I take a lot of photos. This past weekend alone I took 280 photos and videos—and any parent can empathize with trying to get all kids to look at the camera, let alone smile, at the same time. With this many photos from everyday life, my Google Photos library is full of moments—many worth remembering—but sifting through all of these photos can be hard. To address this, we came up with a few new ways for you to get more out of Google Photos and relive the moments that matter.

A stroll down memory lane, right from the app

Certain points in the year make me extra nostalgic—birthdays, trips and holidays most of all—so I pull out my phone to look at old photos. You lose the warm and fuzzy nostalgic feeling when you have to scroll through hundreds of duplicate photos, so we’re putting your memories front and center in Google Photos.

Starting today, you’ll see photos and videos from previous years at the top of your gallery in a new feature we’re calling Memories. While you might recognize this stories format from social media, these memories are your personal media, privately presented to you so you can sit back and enjoy some of your best moments. 

We’re using machine learning to curate what appears in Memories, so you don’t have to parse through many duplicate shots, and you can instead reflect on the best ones, where the photos have good quality and all the kids are smiling. We understand that you might not want to revisit all of your memories, so you’ll be able to hide certain people or time periods, and you have the option to turn this feature off entirely.

Sometimes, when you’re looking back, you know exactly what photo you’re looking for and our search in Google Photos makes it easy to find specific photos. If you want to find photos of your dad’s birthday you can just search his name and “birthday” to find all the relevant shots.  But what about those photos where you don’t remember the exact date or occasion? To make it easy to find photos or screenshots that contain text—like a recipe—you can now search by the text in your photos. When you feel nostalgic for home cooking you can just search “carrot cake” and find your mom’s recipe right away. 

Streamlined sharing with the people who matter

One of the best parts of revisiting your memories is sharing them with the people who made those moments special. In the coming months, it’ll be even easier to send photos directly to your friends or family within the app. Those photos will now be added to an ongoing, private conversation so there’s one place to find the photos you’ve shared with each other and keep the conversation going. And as always, photos you share in Google Photos are the same quality as the photos you back up and you can easily save photos shared with you to your library.

Off of your phone and into your home

Decorating your home with printed photos serves as a daily reminder of life's meaningful moments--big and small. You can already use Google Photos to quickly find and make your memories into a photo book. Now, you can use the same time-saving magic to print individual photos.

Starting today, you can order 4x6 photo prints directly from Google Photos and pick them up same day at CVS Pharmacy or Walmart, at over 11,000 locations with print centers across the U.S. Since your photos are automatically organized and searchable in Google Photos, you can order prints in just a few easy steps. 

To brighten up any room with some of your favorite memories, like your summer vacation or your daughter’s Halloween costume last year—you can now also order canvas prints from Google Photos in the U.S., and they’ll be delivered straight to your home. We’ll also give you suggestions for the best photos to print on canvas. Canvas prints start at $19.99 and come in three different sizes, 8x8, 11x14, and 16x20, so they work for all types of spaces. You can put them on a shelf, prop them up at your desk, or hang them in your living room for everyone to see.

With all of these new features, you can relive your best memories, share them with the people that matter, and get them off of your phone and into your home.