Google Photos now has a feature that will show you all the photos and videos you took on this same day last year. It’s opt-in, and the content will appear within a card in the Assistant view.
From the Google+ post announcing the new feature:
Photos help us reminisce about the things we’ve done, bringing back events from one, two, or even ten years ago. Today, Google Photos is introducing a new opt-in feature where you can choose to privately rediscover your memories from the past. If you snapped photos on a hiking trip this time last year, chances are that Google Photos will let you know. And with a lifetime’s worth of photos and videos in one place, you’ll have lots of memories to look back on.
There are other similar services that also drudge up old content from this same day in year’s past in hopes of providing that warm feeling of nostalgia — most notably Timehop and Facebook’s “On This Day” feature. The former is platform agnostic, showing you content from year’s past posted to whatever services you connect to it.
It’s definitely a cool feature, except that it can in some cases be harmful — particularly when it drudges up memories you may not exactly want to be reminded of, like a bad breakup or passing of a family member. Computers unfortunately are not yet good enough to sort out the bad memories from the good ones, though, so an opt-in model is the way most companies seem to be approaching this right now. Basically, enable at your own risk.
The new feature is live on the web and in Apple’s iOS App Store right now, and is rolling out to Android as we speak. I was not able to find the feature in the most recent Google Play version or in APKMirror, but I’ll update this post when I do find it.
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