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Google+ gets two new features called “Stories” and “Movies” to produce slick content from your images and videos

Ian Morris By Ian Morris
Google isn’t giving up on Google , at least not yet. The company’s well-designed, but quite unpopular social network is getting an update to add more features.

The idea of Stories is that it turns your life into a travelogue, on the fly. Video, photos and location data are turned into a slideshow that is presented full screen. It looks pretty slick, and uses the auto-backup feature from your Android phone to collect the relevant data. This might be one privacy advocates want to avoid. 

The best bit, of course, is that like “auto awesome” and the animated images that Google has implemented on Google it’s all done behind the scenes, and you simply visit your profile to see the results. In our test, a day our for a stag weekend showed as one of the movies, which is either a dire lesson in not taking photos on stag weekends, or something fun to show to people who couldn’t make it.
 

Movies, the second part of the update, takes both photos and videos that you’ve shot, and merges them into one slick, post-produced video. The example given is a birthday party but this is really a continuation of what Google was doing with Auto Awesome before. 

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Of course, Stories and Movies are both kept private until you share them. If you are already backing up your photos to Google you may have Stories and Movies already. There is also an updated Google app for Android that gives access to the new features. 

Ian Morris
By Ian Morris

Ian Morris contributed technology related news to Trusted Reviews in 2014. …

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