Sharing photos on Google Photos has been a challenge – there haven’t been any well-thought ideas around this important task apart from the shared album. Google has come up with a new way – how about adding a chat feature to the app. The revamped share option is a private messaging feature that has been built into the Google Photos for both iOS and Android plus the web version.
Sometimes Google goes two or three months without launching a new messaging app and I get worried. So this news comes as a great relief https://t.co/QFz5Q7iye3
— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) December 3, 2019
How will it work
After taking your favourite snaps and want to share a photo, you just send it as a one-off message to your family relative or friend – no need to create a shared album.
If you feel chatty, you can still continue the conversation and react with likes to the photos shared.
You can also start a group chat with either a family group or a friend group especially this holiday season where a ton of photos will be taken and will need a way for them to be shared.
Everyone in the group chat can share photos, videos and also like or comment on them. They can also share individual files to add to their own collection.
"we met in Google photos" https://t.co/mF3b62YIDe
— Local Man (@KiddBubu) December 3, 2019
While new chats can be created by selecting share under a photo from the main library, existing chats can be accessed from the “Share” tab.
It’s huge for Google as it has previously shut down its other messaging and social apps and the chat feature can piggyback off Google Photos which has become a very popular app to store photos and share memories.
Google's history with releasing and then abandoning chat clients doesn't exactly inspire confidence in this one. https://t.co/3YVyl4QQlG
— Ed Bott (@edbott) December 3, 2019
The app recently hit 1 billion monthly users – Google’s ninth product to cross this mark.
If you take the long view of history every Google product asymptotes to a messaging app https://t.co/X61e0w9fCa
— Zak Kukoff (@zck) December 3, 2019
“This feature isn’t designed to replace any chat apps you already use, but we do hope it improves sharing memories with your friends and family in Google Photos. This is gradually rolling out over the next week and, as always, you can share these photos with your friends and family across all platform — Android, iOS and the web — without any loss in image quality from the photos you backed up,” shares product manager Janvi Shah in a blog post.
Google Photos is rolling out "Conversations" for sharing and commenting on photos and videos. This is less a chat app, and more a tidy replacement for the single-photo albums created when you share an image with someone.https://t.co/t8NrvROePn
— Peggy K (@PeggyKTC) December 3, 2019
In the past, the shared album had privacy risks as the app created obfuscated and semi-public links and could be accessed either from another different Google account and worse even when you open the link in incognito mode.
