For those in the United States, you have a little over a week to prep something nice for your mom for Mother’s Day (May 14th). If you’re running a little behind, or are afraid something won’t ship in time, though, Google Photos will make you a sappy little movie using images in your camera roll — that is, if you have pictures of your mom stored in the service.
The tool is pretty simple: Google Photos will give you a visual list of faces it recognizes in your photos and let you select which one is your mom. Then, you can pick the children — whether that’s you, your siblings, your kids, or maybe close friends that feel like family to you all. The AI doesn’t appear to discriminate between male or female faces — you can pick basically anyone you consider to be your “mother” for the movie. (It even gave me a shot of the dude from the Burger King Google Home commercial... which is, um, not weird at all.)
After a few minutes, the movie should show up in your Assistant tab. I just got a new phone so I don’t have many photos of my mother in my camera roll, which meant the movie mostly featured pictures of myself from my Gmail profile. Awkward! If you’re on desktop, it also doesn’t let you edit the images it picked for the movie, unlike Facebook’s movies for friendship anniversaries, birthdays, and New Year’s. To make changes, you’ll need to do it on the Android or iOS app.
If you keep images backed up from other devices, or have a good collection of family pictures in Google Photos already, this is a simple and easy tool to create something to make mom smile. But you might still want to get her something else on the side or plan to spend time with her on the day. I don’t think my mom will be that impressed with a video featuring two pictures of us together, and a bunch of us separately.
Update May 5th 3:35ET PM: Clarified that the movie is editable via mobile apps.