Google Photos is already capable of some increasingly impressive photo and video tricks – and now it has learned to automatically create highlight videos of the friends, family and places you choose from your library.
The Google Photos app on Android and iOS already offers video creation tools, but with this new update (rolling out October 25) you can search for the people, places, or activities in your library that you like in an AI want to record a movie. video made. The app will then automatically create a one-minute highlight video of all your chosen topics.
This video contains a combination of video clips and photos, but Google Photos also adds music and syncs the footage with those songs. These types of automatically created highlight videos, which we’ve seen in the Google Photos Memories feature and elsewhere from the likes of GoPro, can be a bit hit and miss in their execution, but we’re looking forward to giving Google’s new AI director a spin.
Fortunately, if you don’t like some of Google Photos’ choices, you can also trim or rearrange the clips, and choose some different music. You can see all this in action in the sample video below.
So how can you test this new feature once it rolls out on Android and iOS from October 25?
Press the ‘plus’ icon at the top of the app and you’ll see a new menu with options for creating new albums, collages, cinematic photos, animations and, yes, highlight videos.
Tap ‘Highlight Videos’ and you’ll see a search bar where you can search for your video stars, whether they’re people, places or even the years in which events took place. From Google’s demo, it looks like the default video length is one minute, but here you can make even more adjustments before hitting ‘save’.
We’ve asked Google if this feature is coming to the web version of Google Photos as well as Chromebooks, and will update this article as soon as we hear back.
Tip of the AI iceberg
Google’s main goal with photos and videos is to automate the kinds of operations that non-professionals have little time or inclination to do – so this AI-powered video creation tool isn’t a huge surprise.
We recently saw a related tool appear in Google Photos’ Memories feature, which now lets you “co-author” Memories albums with friends and family. Collaborators can add their own photos and videos to your Memories, which can then be shared as a standalone video.
So whether you want to curate your own highlights or, thanks to this new tool, let Google’s algorithms do it for you, Google Photos is increasingly becoming a hassle-free place to do it.
The Google Pixel 8 Pro also recently debuted some impressive cloud-based video features, including Video Boost and Night Sight Video. The only minor gripe is that these features require an internet connection and don’t work on the device, although AI tools like Magic Eraser and Call Screen will at least work locally on your phone.