Updates to Google Photos ensure you’ll actually see those party photos you’re in

Google Photos has blown up since it launched a few years ago. Google claims now the service has 500 million monthly active users worldwide, and about 1.2 billion photos and videos are uploaded to Google Photos every day. At Google I/O, the company announced a couple new features that make it easier for you to share photos with the people that matter most: suggested sharing and shared libraries.

Suggested sharing is that little nudge most of us need to actually share those photos we promised to share with our friends. Now you'll receive notifications after you've taken a bunch of photos with others that remind you to share those images with both the people in the photos and your loved ones. In the Google Photos app, you'll receive suggestions of people to share photos with, including people the app has identified in the photos themselves.

Once you choose the photos you want to share via Google Photos and the recipients, those people will get a notification that photos have been shared with them. If one of them doesn't have Google Photos installed on their device (the app is available for Android and iOS), they'll be sent a message prompting them to download the app and see the photos you've shared with them. Google Photos will also suggest photos to share to those recipients as well, in case they have images similar to those in your shared albums and want to send them out to the group as well.

Shared libraries is the other new feature that takes a more intimate approach to suggested sharing. With this feature, you can share your entire photo library with very important people like your partner. You can put stipulations on this, like telling Google Photos to only share pictures with certain people in them, or only pictures from a certain date onward. In Google's demo, it showed you can take a photo of a crowd of people and then a photo of your children and Google Photos will recognize that only one of those photos includes your kids and only send that image to your partner.

As with sharing suggestions, shared libraries seems to make it easier for you to passively share images with those who matter most. Once you set up rules for your shared library, there's not much else you have to do in the future and your best photos will get shared automatically with the people you love.

Google also announced an easier way to make physical collections of photos with Photo Books. Now you'll have the option to make a photo book right in the Google Photos app. simply pick a bunch of photos, select the Photo book option, and then Google Photos will filter out the highest-quality images from the ones you chose to include in the book. Photo Books start at $9.99 and the Photo Books feature, along with suggested sharing and shared libraries, will hit Google Photos in the coming weeks.