Google Stories launches to organise holiday snaps into narrative

21 May 2014

Internet search giant Google is attempting to remove the hassle of organising holiday snaps and itineraries by turning the best images, maps and video clips into a timeline narrative through its Google+ Stories service.

As part of Google’s own social network Google+, the new service is tapping into the frustration and effort involved in trying to organise and order perhaps weeks’ worth of content a person may have created during a holiday.

The appearance of the timeline is similar to flicking through a physical photo album and will list each date with the added ability to move photos around afterwards.

“No more sifting through photos for your best shots, racking your brain for the sights you saw, or letting your videos collect virtual dust,” Google+’s director of product management Anil Sabharwal wrote in the Official Google Blog.

“We’ll just gift you a story after you get home. This way you can relive your favourite moments, share them with others, and remember why you travelled in the first place.”

Sabharwal added that all it takes to access Google+ Stories is for a for a Google+ user to back up his or her photos and videos to the social network and another of Google’s earlier releases – Auto Awesome – will begin working away to place them in a narrative.

Launched last year, Auto Awesome introduced a number of editing effects, such as the ability to include falling snow or turn the image into an animated GIF file through Google’s Android operating system on mobile devices.

Also available on desktop PCs, Google expects the feature to become available soon on iOS also.

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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