What’s happened? Google Photos is rolling out its 2025 Recap, a personalized time capsule that uses Google’s Gemini model to sift through your photos and shape them into a summary of your year. It does more than show your best moments by pulling out hidden trends, quirky stats, and even shows how obsessed you were with selfies.
- Gemini scans your library to identify themes, milestones, trips, and things you photographed often.
- You get familiar stats like your top people and total photo count, plus a new selfie count for 2025.
- Recap lives in the Memories carousel and is pinned in the Collections tab for all of December.
Why should I care? Recap pulls out memorable photos and moments from your year and wraps them in fun visuals. You can see who appeared in your photos the most, how many shots you took in total, and a separate count of how many selfies you snapped, which is calculated using face detection.
- Gemini looks not just at faces and dates but at the content of your photos to identify your standout hobbies and what it calls your “one true passion.”
- This time, you can also hide specific people or individual photos from your Recap, then regenerate it so the updated version no longer includes them.
- The Recap can be exported to CapCut with exclusive Google Photos templates, letting you customize the video before sharing it.
OK, what’s next? Google is also working on tools that could help clean up skin blemishes in portraits, while making it easier to creatively restyle old memories with new editing options. The company is even experimenting with fun ideas like using AI to put your face into classic memes and retro styles.
Most people take thousands of photos and rarely go back to look at them. Google Photos Recap helps you rediscover the story behind your year and creates a polished highlight reel that is easy to save or share.
