At Google I/O back in May, the search giant announced several exciting new features for Google Photos. Two of the most eagerly-awaited, suggested sharing and shared libraries, are now available.

“To help you share and receive more of the meaningful moments in your life, we’re rolling out suggested sharing and shared libraries this week,” Google’s James Gallagher writes in a new post to the Google Photos Blog. “Suggested sharing uses machine learning to automatically identify photos and suggest recipients, making sharing as simple as a single tap. With shared libraries, sending and receiving photos with one person is effortless: You can automatically share your full photo library or customize just what you want to share.”

As noted, Google announced several important improvements to Google Photos at its I/O conferencelast month. Two of the more minor updates, photo book support and archiving, arrived in early June. But suggested sharing and shared libraries are major new features.

I’m not seeing an app update on either Android or iPhone, but Google says it will happen this week. (I’m often several days behind an app update announcement for whatever reason.) I do see the update on the web version of Google Photos, fortunately.

But here’s what’s new.

Suggested sharing. A new Sharing tab in Google Photos displays sharing suggestions, photos shared with you, and photos that others have shared with you. If you do choose to share something, you can edit the recipients, and which photos to share, as you do so.

Shared libraries. Navigate to Menu -> Shared libraries and you can choose to share all or some of your library with others. For example, I used this feature to share my entire photo collection with my wife (and she did the same).

So far, so good. I can’t wait to get this on mobile.

Tagged with Google, Google Photos