You can now order photo books and archive images on Google Photos

At its annual developers conference earlier in the month, Google announced three new features for its Photos app: automatically curated albums, photo books and sharing suggestions.

Today, the company pushed an update to its Photos app for iOS, Android and the web, bringing support for ordering printed photo books comprised of your best photographs. You can make a photo book in minutes with automatic photo curation and easy customization.

Photo books

To order a printed photo book, select the images you’d like to fill your album with. Google’s machine learning picks the best shots for your, removing duplicates and poor quality images.

In fact, the app will even offer personalized suggestions for photo books, like your trip to the Grand Canyon, time with family during the holidays, your puppy and so forth.

You can order a seven-inch square softcover book for $10 a piece or its nine-inch hardcover version for twice as much. Each has twenty pages though you can buy additional pages if you’d like:

  • Softcover—$0.35 per additional page
  • Hardcover—$0.65 per additional page

Photo books are currently available to users in the US only.

However, the search company has made promises to bring them to more countries soon.

Google photo books key highlights:

  • Quickly find your best shots— Start from an album or search for a person, place or thing. Then, Google Photos can automatically pick out your best photos—helping you save time.
  • Perfect your book in minutes—Easily move around your photos, add a book title and tweak your cover design.
  • Beautifully crafted for you—Just choose a size and get started on your phone or computer. Photo books are made in the USA from premium, responsibly sourced materials.

Apple’s Photos app supports photo books, too. As a matter of fact, ordering photo books has been part of the now phased-out iPhoto app for almost a decade.

Archive photos

Aside from photo books, today’s update includes the Archive feature.

Chances are your photo library includes not only your selfies, food shots and cherished memories, but the more mundane pictures as well, like recipes, receipts, scanned documents and so forth.

Now you can move images to the app’s new Archive section to tidy up your photo grid.

To get started, simply select a few photos you’d like to archive, tap the Menu icon and choose Archive from the popup menu. This simply moves the selected photos to your archive rather than delete them. Any archived images and videos remain visible in search and albums.

Aside from the image archival feature and photo books, this update includes performance improvements and reduces the amount of on-device storage space used by the app.