At Google's Tuesday Nexus 5X/6P event, the company took the opportunity to announce tweaks and bonuses to a few of its apps. Of particular note is the company's Play Music service offering its own "family plan" catch-up to that of Apple Music.

Starting "later this year," the service will offer a $14.99 per month plan for up to six users, and each user will receive his or her own tailored recommendations based on personal playback history. UK or European pricing isn't known yet, but it'll likely be around £15 per month.

The Google Photos app will also receive a range of updates starting "this week" and continuing through the rest of this year for its sharing and casting options. The biggest change, "shared albums," will allow Google Photos users across both Android and iOS to share and contribute to photo albums with each other. These appear to work in the form of sending HTML links which, upon opening, immediately invite the new user and open sharing permissions.

Doing this also allows users to subscribe to that album's updates, meaning they'll receive notifications on their mobile OS of choice when new photos are added. Shared albums will arrive "later this year."

Compound searches will arrive to Google Photos later this week, which Google has advertised as a more granular way of digging through thousands of photos to find specific moments. This will require users to manually tag specific people in their photo galleries—"mom," "dad," "creepy Ted"—and once they do so, Google Photos will allegedly understand search requests such as "creepy Ted at the beach" or "dad at the baseball game."

The most glaring catch-up announcement to Apple's offerings is the ability to cast Google Photos images, videos, and even GIFs to Chromecast devices—a function that was lost during the de-Plussification of Google Photos. Android users will be able to do so "this week," while iOS users will get the functionality through their Google Photos app "very soon." A demonstration showed off the ability to sort through images privately on a phone screen while the most recently casted image remained on the Chromecast TV screen.