Google Photos is giving users more control over the app’s generative AI photo-to-video feature. According to the updated announcement on Monday, Google Photos now supports text prompts for video creation, allowing users to describe the specific movement, style or effect they want to see when bringing still images to life.
The text prompts join the existing “subtle movement” and “I’m feeling lucky” options already available for Google Photos’ image-to-video tool — neither of which allowed users to enter their own details to guide the results. Google says the photos will provide quick suggestions “for instant video inspiration”, and text prompts can be edited to improve the resulting video generations.
The new text prompt feature is restricted to users 18 years of age or older. This age restriction only applies to Google’s image-to-video tool in Photos, however – text prompts have been available for similar capabilities in Gemini for some time, and are available to any user 13 years of age or older. The ability to add descriptive cues brings Photos’ image-to-video tool in line with rival AI editors like xAI’s Grok, which was especially abused to highlight photos of real people and children.
Generative AI features in Google Photos are not yet available in all regions, and exact functionality may vary by location. You can check out Google’s help page for more information about current restrictions.
The update allows Google Photos users to include audio by default in every video created using the image-to-video feature, creating videos that are ready to be published online without any additional editing. In another update, Google introduced a new Google Photos picker for Gmail that makes it easier to share images and videos from your Albums, Collections, and Shared Albums over email. This feature allows you to select multiple photos and videos at the same time and search specific photos and album names.
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