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Google Photos will now show you photos and videos from the past

Google Photos will now show you photos and videos from the past

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Opt-in for nostalgia

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Google Photos is one of the best photo storage options around. It's free, you can store as many gigabytes or terabytes of your memories as you want, and it has an incredibly smart built-in search engine. Now, a new feature is rolling out to Google Photos that plays with the idea of extracting nostalgia from all those photos and videos you've chosen to store there. Every time you open up the app, it now surfaces photos and videos taken on that date in years past — much like how nostalgia app Timehop works.

The Google Photos app will now serve up cards in the "assistant view" that urge you to "rediscover this day," and they can include photos, photo collages, or videos. The cards will tell you where you were and who you were with on that day, and the app also sticks a little graphic over everything that tells you which year it was from — another little bit that is extremely similar to Timehop.

A daily blast from the past

Of course, the feature isn't just for you and your personal reflections. All of this can be shared to various social networks. You do have to opt in to activate it though — a nice change of pace considering how the app is already known to make decisions without the user's blessing.

The new feature is another powerful selling point for a photo storage app that is all about doing the work for you. It's already available on the web and in the iOS version of Google Photos, and is rolling out to Android devices as well.