Google Photos 4.47 tests showing “Recent Highlights” album in the Memories header

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Google Photos is one of my most beloved apps that I have on my phones. While I cherish it for letting me sync each of the photos I take from all the smartphones that come in for review, I also adore its features such as face tagging for humans and pets and showing me photos from the past through Memories. Being one of the apps that users interact with most frequently, Google Photos gets plenty of updates, and a future update may bring “Recent Highlights” which automatically compiles your best pictures to show on the top alongside memories.

In Google Photos 4.47, Google is testing surfacing the “Recent Highlights” album in the Memories header, and the images inside also move in a carousel format similar to Memories. This album is an “automatically curated album of your best photos” according to its description from the Photo Frame setting. We manually surfaced this Recent Highlights album on the latest version of Google Photos, and we are not aware of this feature rolling out for any users yet.

While Recent Highlights is just starting to show up within Photos, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this album. If you own a smart display like the Google Nest Hub or any Android TV or Chromecast device, you can view this album using the Google Home app. Among the albums you can choose, there is “Recent Highlights” which is composed automatically by Google. While the criterion for these “best photos” isn’t clear, Google seemingly chooses you and your family’s best images which have good lighting and details. More recently, Google also added the option to cast these albums to smart displays directly from Photos.

You get to see four of the Recent Highlights images as the folder icon on Google Home but you can’t select them. In Photos, you can’t even see these pictures. We’re still not sure whether Google wants to just show this as just another feed alongside Memories or as an option elsewhere too. The test and the history of the feature do suggest it we might see it on the Google Assistant’s ambient mode or the photo frame feature which appears when you rest the Pixel 3/3XL or Pixel 4/4XL on the Pixel Stand.