4 ways Apple could improve Memories in Photos
If you’ve been using the new version of Photos you may already be enjoying its Memories feature. This automatically creates albums for things like dates, travel, people, special occasions and more and in my experience is a great way to rediscover forgotten moments hidden inside your photo library. Here are a few suggestions to make it better.
Key frame
The machine intelligence that drives this feature is pretty cool, but while it is quite good at identifying and assembling these albums, it doesn’t always choose the best possible image as the album title photo that well. At this time Apple offers no way I can find to change this, other than recreating the album yourself and setting a new frame. This seems a simple addition to make.
Continuity
I fully respect Apple’s decision to cause all the calculations within Photos to take place on the Mac or the device, however, this can lead to some inconsistencies and some great collections (or collections you’ve managed to figure out how to edit) aren’t repeated across devices. Why not have a ‘Share Memory to iCloud’ option in the Share item?
Sharing
The sharing options aren’t bad. I would like Apple to make it possible to share the photos and videos that comprise a memory using Share on an iOS device, but you at present this is only possible on a Mac. You can save a Favorite Memory that behaves a little more like a standard album, but it would perhaps be easier if this became an Add to Albums command. This would be designed to take all the images and video in the selected Memory and automatically create a ‘normal’ album, which would sync between devices. This would at least be self-explanatory.
Ratings
Every kind of AI benefits from a little feedback, in this case, I’d like something simple – a star ratings system to assess the accuracy of a collection for you, and an easy way to remove images from collections that does not involve deleting them from your device. It may also be good to find some way to link albums that don’t otherwise seem linked, enabling more direct personalization of your collections. That’s not to say the AI isn’t up to the task – it’s surprisingly accurate, but it’s always nice to take control.
I like the Memories feature and I’m sure Apple has many improvements planned, but the ability to easily share collections across Macs and devices and to set your own key frame seem pretty important to me.
How would you improve it?
