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Google Photos will now automatically surface pictures you took in years past

The revamped Google Photos service that was introduced at I/O this year is already one of our favorite ways to manage our ever-growing image collections, and Google keeps on adding features to make it better. The latest is a new tool that lets you walk down memory lane, so to speak. The Google Photos "assistant" will now show you cards that contain images that you shot on the same day in years past, letting you reminisce about whatever exciting things you took pictures of way back when. It's not clear yet if this new feature will show you every single photo you snapped on a given day or just a curated selection, but either way it sounds like a smart way to surface images that you may have forgotten you ever took.

Google has wisely chosen to make this an opt-in feature, so if you're worried about being reminded of past exes or other memories you'd like to avoid, just keep the feature turned off. It otherwise seems like a smart addition to the ever-growing Google Photos feature set -- the Timehop app is just one example of a service that's found a place for itself by surfacing old memories and photos you've posted to social media, and Facebook has its own "on this day" feature to tickle the old nostalgia bone. Google says its new memory-surfacing features will roll out today on iOS, Android and on the web.