You know that thing in Apple Photos and Google Photos where they just randomly generate a video slideshow with a generic title that sometimes includes only the worst images? Google says that soon you’ll be able to ask Google Photos to do them for you. The company will begin rolling out an update that will allow you to choose the parameters of the videos you want the app to make instead of just passively waiting for them to happen to you.
Even if the app sometimes still makes objectively bad decisions for the videos it creates, this is a big update. In fact, it’s one of those features that, if it didn’t immediately bother you because it wasn’t there the whole time, you might look at this news story and think, “Hey, yeah, why is this?” At the moment happening?”
Here’s how it works: Find the content you want: the people, places, or activities you want Google Photos to find and include. The app will then select the images it deems suitable, set them to music, and sync everything for you. Once you get the video, Google says you can trim clips, rearrange them, or change the music to something better.
Before, you could create these videos, but you had to manually search and select the content you wanted in them. This seems like a good middle ground between that and waiting for the videos to come to you and then modifying them.
If you don’t have the feature tomorrow, that’s normal – Google tends to roll out new features over time rather than removing them all at once. We asked the company if this will come to the web, supported OS versions, editing capabilities, and what other tags might work for this. (Can you search “puppy” and remember with an ai-generated video of your good dog when he was just a sweet, cool ball of fur? I hope so.) We will update this story when we know more.
Hopefully, Apple will bring this feature to the iPhone as well.
