Forget disorganized photo albums by Facebook, Dropbox and the old Google+. Google's revamped social network now creates your own scrapbook for you.
To convince more people to sign up to Google+, which is pitifully ailing behind other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, Google+ rolled out two promising features called Stories and Movies, which automatically creates aesthetically pleasing albums and movie reels based on the photos and videos you have backed up on Google+.
The idea behind Stories is simple. When you come home from an amazing event where you've taken hundreds of photos, half of which are blurred, duplicates or not just pleasant enough to look at and to share online with your friends, you can simply upload all the photos to Google+ and Google's Auto Awesome editing tools will do the rest. These automated tools will choose the best pictures for sharing and put them together into an aesthetically pleasing Story, so you don't have to worry about a team of Google engineers looking at your photos all day.
"No more sifting through photos for your best shots, racking your brain for the sights you saw, or letting your videos collect virtual dust," writes Anil Sabharwal, Google+ director of product management, on the Google blog. "This way you can relieve your favorite moments, share them with others, and remember why you traveled in the first place."
Stories uses location tracking, that is if you have it turned on for Google+, and image recognition to determine if the pictures were taken during a trip. It can also recognize landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon or the Statue of Liberty and assemble these photos the way you would put them in a scrapbook. Once the Story is done, you can easily move the photos around, take out photos you don't like and add captions and a title for your Story.
"The goal is that each Story will be 95% ready to go and then it's up to the user to add or take away whatever details they want, and share them or not," says Ben Eidelson, product manager of Google+ Photos. "We've all struggled with taking 300 photos and then taking days to get to sorting through them, and then not even getting around to sharing them until weeks later. We really hope Stories will make this entire experience better by doing the hard parts for you."
A similar but separate feature is Movies, which creates a highlight reel of your photos and videos, all while including music, transitions and effects.
Google+ will start rolling out Stories and Movies to the Web, Android and iOS on Tuesday. In fact, if you go over to your Google+ account right now, you just might find Stories and Movies created from your existing photos and videos. All Stories and Movies are set to private by default, so you can decide whether to share them with a circle of your friends or keep them to yourself.
Here's an example of a Google+ Movie posted by Sabharwal on his Google+ page.
