Google Photos Gets More Personal With Activity-Based Personalization

Google Photos likes to show off how smart it is by creating memories for you in a fancy slideshow style. These memories could be about people, trips, pets, similar shots, that sort of thing. They are a really cool feature and have been great about resurfacing times from long ago or making me smile about a moment I needed to see again.

Google wants these memories to be more personalized, though. We noticed a new section added to a Google Support page today for Google Photos called “Activity data settings” and it sounds like something you’ll want to make a decision about.

This new setting was created for activity-based personalization, which is a fancy way of saying that Google Photos wants to “show you even more personalized memories based on how you interact with features.” In other words, Google Photos can now track which memories or features you use/skip/view to better surface more stuff you’ll want to see.

Google says that this feature will be turned on by default, so if this sounds like tracking awfulness you’d rather do without, you’ll need to turn it off. To do so, you’ll do the following (once it goes live on your account):

1. On your computer, go to photos.google.com.
2. At the top, click Settings.
3. Turn Activity-based personalization on or off.

Will turning this off break the Google Photos experience? No, you’ll simply not “experience additional personalization based on your activity,” but the rest stays the same.