On my own phone, folders for Twitter, downloads, Instagram, screenshots, Slack and WhatsApp all have “back up & sync” disabled. Other services affected include LINE, Helo, Snapchat, Viber and Messenger, an XDA developer told Android Police. If you rely on Photos to backup images from those sites and others, here’s how to turn it back on.

Google’s automated Photos printing service wasn’t long for this world — at least, not in its first incarnation. Droid Life has learned (via The Verge) that Google is shutting down the AI-guided trial service on June 30th. It didn’t say what prompted the closure in a notice to members, but it said it hoped to “evolve this feature” and make it “more widely available.” This isn’t the end, then, even if the service is likely to change.

The $8 per month trial had AI pick your 10 best pictures (prioritized by faces, landscapes or a mix) and print them on 4×6 cardstock, with edits if you preferred. They were meant to be gifts, or just fond memories if you wanted more than just digital copies. Google didn’t have the best timing, however. The service became public knowledge in February, just a month before much of the world entered pandemic lockdowns — it’s hard to justify spending money on a photo service when you can’t socialize or travel. If there is a follow-up service, it might have to wait.

You no longer have to wonder whether or not you can transfer Facebook pictures and videos to Google Photos. The company’s Alexandru Voica has revealed that everyone worldwide now has access to a tool that sends media to Google’s cloud service. As before, you’ll have to dive into “Your Facebook Information” in settings and tell the site to transfer all your photos or all your videos (you can’t do both at the same time) to Google.

This is part of an industry Data Transfer Project that’s meant to increase the portability of your info between services. It’s partly meant to reduce scrutiny from antitrust regulators worried that internet giants are using locked-down data to discourage competition. Still, the immediate user benefits are obvious — you won’t have to keep a Facebook account open (or worry about it being hijacked) just to preserve all those family photos and concert clips for posterity.

For people who don’t have Photos or a Google account, you’ll still have the option to share an album with them using a link. You can enable and disable link sharing as you wish, and Google gives you the option to decide whether other people can contribute content. When you remove someone from an album, any photos and videos they added to it will disappear as well. 

As before, Google says the new functionality isn’t designed to replace the chat apps you already use. However, it hopes the feature will improve “sharing memories with your friends and family in Google Photos.” The company says it will roll out direct album sharing to all users over the next week. As usual, sometimes these things can take some time, so be patient if Photos still defaults to link sharing.   

Whoa, what? @googlephotos? pic.twitter.com/2cZsABz1xb

— Jon Oberheide (@jonoberheide) February 4, 2020

As you can see, Google will tell you clearly if any of your files were affected. Further, the warning notes that backups made during that five-day period may be incomplete. Google says it has already identified and resolved the issue and suggests deleting the export you made in November to make a new one. Of course, you can only hope that Google didn’t mistakenly put your videos in the hands of someone unscrupulous.

Thankfully, only 0.01 percent of Photos users were affected, the company told 9to5Google, and the bug wasn’t present in any other Google product. It also told the publication:

“We are notifying people about a bug that may have affected users who used Google Takeout to export their Google Photos content between November 21 and November 25. These users may have received either an incomplete archive, or videos—not photos—that were not theirs. We fixed the underlying issue and have conducted an in-depth analysis to help prevent this from ever happening again. We are very sorry this happened.”

The trial is billed as invitation- and US-only. We’ve asked Google if it can elaborate on its plans for the trial, including the possibility of a wider rollout.

The test is pitched as ideal for those who want to frame their snapshots or and them out as “gifts to the important.” It could certainly be helpful if you’re an avid photographer who wants tangible copies of your finest work, and might help Google pad its bottom line even when customers don’t pay for extra storage. With that said, this may be a tough sell in its current form. You not only need to take at least 10 photos per month for this to make sense, you need to take photos you’d be happy to print for posterity. This won’t help much if you just use Google Photos as a backup for your Instagram throwaways.

Now when you’re sending pictures and videos to your friends or family, you can share them in an ongoing, private conversation in @googlephotos. Here’s how sharing within the app just got simpler https://t.co/aBDfhzSyyt pic.twitter.com/QJ2j0crME9

— Google (@Google) December 3, 2019

When you share individual photos and videos, you can add them to a private chat in the app or on the website. You’ll be able to like and comment on pictures and clips and save them to your own gallery.

“This feature isn’t designed to replace the chat apps you already use, but we do hope it improves sharing memories with your friends and family in Google Photos,” Janvi Shah, product manager at Google Photos, wrote in a blog post. Photos can be a great jumping-off point for a conversation, as the likes of Instagram have shown. The chat function is rolling out across Android, iOS and the web over the next week.

Specifically, you can’t just pull up a photo and start tagging your friends and family. To be able to take advantage of the feature, Photos’ face recognition algorithm needs to first recognize there are in fact human or animal faces in a photo. There are instances in which the app sometimes fails to correctly tag people, such as in shots where someone wasn’t looking directly at the camera. Where it does work, you’ll be able to both edit and add new tags.

To access the feature, tap and then swipe up on a photo to get to the overflow menu — alternately, you can tap on a photo and then tap the three dots icon to get to the same place. If the feature has rolled out to your device, you’ll see a pencil icon to the right of the “People” section heading. Tapping on that icon will allow you to edit any tags as you see fit.

Obviously, Google’s current implementation of face tagging isn’t perfect, but it’s still a step in the right direction. And more so than with a lot of its other apps, Google has been good about improving Photos in smart ways. For example, the company recently added a Memories feature that uses an Instagram Stories-like interface to surface your old photos. While not as attention-grabbing of a feature like Memories, a lot of people will appreciate the ability to edit their face tags, even if it’s a bit limited at this moment.

In a video (above) Android product manager Arvind Chandrababu said the feature makes it easy to accomplish tasks with just a few clicks while your phone is charging. “Now with one tap, you can set the alarm, you can look at what time your first meeting is the next day, you can turn off the lights and you can also have a slide show of your photo memories.” He added that the experience is “deeply integrated” into the Android OS and that Google has a number of similar similar features planned for OEM devices going forward.

Much like Pixel Stand, there’s both a lockscreen that shows the time over a Google Photos slideshow, if desired. Tapping through shows notification cards with messages, calls, appointments, weather and more. At the bottom is a row of icons for controlling smart lights, enabling “do not disturb” mode and more.

The experience is meant for phones that don’t have their own charging screen lock implementations, which might explain why it’s not coming to the Pixel and other brands, apparently including Samsung devices. Chandrababu said it would come to “select devices” with Android 8 and above in the coming weeks. When it does, you’ll get a notification to “see your photos and personal updates.”

You can replicate this behavior with Samsung devices, but HEIC (aka HEIF) isn’t the default format and thus isn’t used nearly as often.

While it’s not clear exactly how Google intends to address this, the solution probably won’t thrill iOS users. If Google mandated a conversion to JPEGs for free users, it would chew up more of its own resources and reducing quality for people used to seeing their photos untouched. Effectively, it’d hurt functionality just to ensure that iOS and Android users were on equal footing.