This great free Google Photos update will make your Memories more magical

Good news for Google Photos users: many of the changes to Memories that Google announced a few weeks back are rolling out to the app right now, delivering a dramatically improved experience in that part of the app.

Memories was added to the Google Photos app three years ago, and since then it hasn't changed much. Now, though, it's had a major rethink – and with more than 3.5 billion Memories being viewed each month, that rethink is going to be seen by an awful lot of people. So it's just as well that it's an improvement.

What's new in Google Photos Memories

The Memories interface has been redesigned to show you more videos, including the best bits from your longer clips thanks to Photos' automatic selection and trimming. There's a new, subtle zoom on static images that makes them feel more alive, and from October there will also be instrumental music that can turn your hilarious holiday snaps into a tear-jerker.

One of the things that really bugs me about memories in other apps, and I'm giving Facebook a hard stare here, is that their selection of things you might want to remember often includes things you really don't want to remember – from events that make you sad to people that you find annoying. So it's good to see that Google Photos retains the ability to hide photos of specific people, and to exclude certain time periods from the Memories feature.

To accompany the new Memories feature Google is also rolling out a new feature called Styles, which adds artwork to give your Memories more of a scrapbook or photo album vibe. And it's easier to share your memories too: by default they're only ever visible to you, but you can now share specific Memories with other Google Photos users if you wish. That's Android-only to begin with, but it'll be coming to iOS and the web soon too.