The fear of friends scrolling back too far through your photos might soon be a thing of the past as Google introduces an archive option to separate private pictures from your main feed.
Read more: Google wants your phone to be as good as a DSLR at taking photos at night
Available on Android, the archive option allows you to remove certain photos from your library without deleting them. The feature is found in the overflow menu of any picture, by pressing the "..." button on the right-hand side of the feed, and a tutorial pops up the first time you use the feature, prompting a walkthrough. Once the pictures have been hidden on a separate archive page they can be returned to the main feed at any time.
9to5google first spotted the tool, noting that an archive feature for the web and iOS could follow in the "coming days".
The update comes in the wake of another addition to Google's photo service – Suggested Share. Powered by artificial intelligence, Suggested Share works to gently remind you to share photos while offering suggestions about who you should share them with. It's a machine learning algorithm that seems oddly open to peer pressure, or at the very least acts as an instigator for oversharing. The service will also soon be getting the Google Lens feature, meaning an AI will be able to recognise who you were with in a picture, what buildings were around you and your exact location at the time the photo was taken.
Google's expansion into digital photos also include the recent PhotoScan app, with an anti-glare mode to let you scan an image with one tap rather than having to take several pictures.
As Google Photo service moves further into building sharing libraries between multiple users, a feature that can archive and separate photos from your main feed could provide an added measure of privacy - or at least, a failsafe for oversharing.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
