Google announced today on their official blog that they are adding two new features to Google+ for desktop and mobile. The new features, called Stories and Movies, will bring together photos, videos, and places visited into travelogues and highlight reel videos.
The announcement states:
No more sifting through photos for your best shots, racking your brain for the sights you saw, or letting your videos collect virtual dust. We’ll just gift you a story after you get home. This way you can relive your favorite moments, share them with others, and remember why you traveled in the first place.
Stories is now available on the Google+ website with an update to the Android app coming later this week. The iOS app will be updated “soon.” To access the new Stories feature look under Photos, More, and then Stories.
After coming home from a vacation, Google+ will “gift” you a Story within 24 hours, and you’ll get a notification when your Story is ready. When curating a Story, Google+ chooses the “best” photos and video highlights, and then brings in the names of cities and places visited using the location data in your photos.
Once your Story is built, you can customize it and share it anywhere on the Web. The default setting, as with anything automatically uploaded to Google+, is private. So what happens in Vegas will stay in Vegas, unless you want to share it with others.
The new Google+ Movies feature is slightly different, rather than curating photos from an entire trip it creates a highlight reel of a specific event. The highlight reels contain video clips and related photos, complete with a soundtrack, special effects, and transitions.
Movies launches today on Android, iOS and the web, so a lot more people will have access to this feature. Here’s an example of what one looks like:
To use either of these features, just back up your photos and videos to Google+, and then Auto Awesome will do all the work. If you already backup your photos and videos online, there might already be some stories put together for you, so go take a look.