Just in time for all your holiday gatherings, Google is updating its Photos service with a new shared albums feature that aims to make swapping snaps a breeze.
We’ve all been there before: You’re out at an event with a bunch of friends and/or family and everyone’s snapping photos and videos. You get home and realize you only took a few with your own device, and none of them are all that great. Now comes the annoying process of trying to track down everyone’s photos.
All those videos other people shot? You can probably forget about ever seeing them again. Enter Google Photos shared albums.
“With today’s launch, you can now make the albums you send collaborative,” Google Photos Engineering Lead James Gallagher wrote in a blog post. Friends and family members can join your album and add their own photos and videos, and everyone will get a notification when new content is added. Once someone adds a photo or video to your shared album, you can save it to your own Google Photos library and do with it what you please.
“Best of all, there’s no setup — select photos, make an album, and then send the link off to whomever you’d like,” Gallagher wrote. “And it works no matter what device your friends and family are using—tablet or laptop, Android or iPhone.”
