Both Android and iOS users will be able to leverage the new Google Photos chatting interface

As the Christmas and New Year roll around, you'll likely find yourself constantly sharing photos from your phone – or trying to get the one passable group shot from your friend so that you can post it on your social media account as well. Pinging photos around is easy if everyone uses the same brand of smartphone, but if you've got a Black Sheep in your family on the other operating system, then Google Photos is a good compromise.

And now, Google has added a nifty new feature to make sending snaps and videos to loved ones even easier. For those who don't know, Google Photos is designed to store your photos and videos in the cloud – although, you can also download hard copies onto your device too. As well as editing tools and automatic tagging, one of the biggest draws is sharing memories with others. Until now, the only way to send a photo to another Google Photo user was to add it to a live album, shared library, or shared album. While these certainly get the job done, they’re unabashedly designed for sharing a multitude of different photos at once, not a single image by itself. Thankfully, Google is now introducing a new feature for Photos that makes it much more simple to send individual images to others. Now, if you click in a photo and press the share button located in the bottom left-hand corner and choose to send it to a contact in Google Photos you’ll be thrown into a WhatsApp-style chat menu.

Google Photos' new chatting interface is accessed via the sharing menu

The new feature for Google Photos is rolling out right now

From there you can send photos to a single contact or a group of individuals. The chatting interface works exactly as you’d expect, meaning you can reply to photos that have been sent across. Explaining the new feature, Google said: “Google Photos’ live albums, shared libraries, and shared albums make sharing lots of photos simple, and starting today, we’re also making it easier to share the individual, everyday moments through Google Photos. “You’ve always been able to share individual photos through the app by creating an album for a single photo and sharing the link. But we’ve heard from some of you that this could be a simpler experience, so now when you share one-off photos and videos, you’ll have the option to add them to an ongoing, private conversation in the app. "This gives you one place to find the moments you’ve shared with your friends and family and keep the conversation going.”