Google Photos is getting Chromecast support, name labels and improved album sharing
Google had a bit of news to announce for Google Photos users today. The biggest news is that it finally gets Chromecast support, making it easy to share your photos and albums with whoever’s in the room on the big screen. GIFs and video are supported just as well as photos are. Those sharing to the screen can “pause” the view so that folks in the room won’t get a look at other images on their phone as they scroll to find the next photo they want to cast.
Google is also putting its machine learning algorithm to work by allowing you to automatically label yourself and the people in your photos. It’ll learn their faces, and tag their names to it accordingly. You can customize the names for anyone you want, and Google will tag it with that name whenever they recognize the person’s photo.
And all of this is private to you and you alone, if there was any worry about any of that. You can then use the labels to search your album with context-sensitive search words. Searching “dad vacation,” for instance, will turn up all those cringe-worthy photos of your dad in his ridiculous Hawaiian shirts. Neato.
Coming later this year is a shared albums feature, so two or more people can collaborate on an album and add/grab photos on their own accord. Everyone on a shared album will get a notification whenever a new photo is added. It’s nothing we haven’t seen on other platforms (we’re looking at you, iCloud Photos), but it’s these small things that Google is hoping will turn Photos into a must-have utility for those who want to keep all their archives in the cloud.