Google Photos introduces 2025 recap with AI-powered storylines of your favourite moments

Google is once again treating Google Photos users with a year-end recap. Introduced for 2025, these Google Photos Year in Review recaps combine cinematic aesthetics, personalised collage layouts, and video “souvenirs” to help you look back and re-live your memorable photo and video moments in 2025.

Google Photos 2025 Recap

Google Photos’ 2025 Recap appears as a dedicated highlight (collage or video, based on your preference) in the Memories carousel (or in the Collections tab) on the app’s home screen. For this recap, Google Photos harvests your images and clips from throughout the year to create a beautiful, personalised, video or collage recap that you can share with friends and family (the Recap video also works as an animated GIF).

Google’s Recap builds on similar offerings from YouTube Music and YouTube, curating your best memories into a shareable year-in-review package. In many ways, the Recap aims to be a visual and kinetic snapshot -a highlight reel, if you will – that captures, at-a-glance, the “best of” your year.

Eligibility & Availability

Google says the 2025 Recap is being “rolling launched.” This means the feature isn’t going to appear for every Google Photos user all at once. Instead, the feature will be made available for a small percentage of users over time, based on a few preconditions:

Taken a “sufficient number” of photos/videos in 2025

Enabled the Face Groups setting (enables face recognition)

Photo/video backup enabled for the year, and using the latest version of Google Photos app

Once your Google Photos account becomes eligible for the recap, you will be notified. You’ll then have access to it until at least the end of December – the Recap is pinned in the Collections tab on the home screen through December. After the new year, the Recap moves to the main photo grid under the “December” section.

Editing & Privacy

While earlier “year in review” collages were a “set it and forget it” affair – auto-generated and set in stone – with this year’s Recap, Google has added some user controls. For 2025, Google says you can now hide specific photos or people from your recap. After you make the necessary changes, Google Photos will then regenerate a new version of the Recap – usually in around 30 minutes.

Once you’re happy with the result, you can share the Recap, either as a message or on social media. The idea: to give users the ability to curate and celebrate (or not!) their visual memories, on their terms.

Meaning & Implications

With its 2025 Recap, Google Photos is reiterating its pivot over the past few years away from being a straightforward “cloud backup” app to a more holistic “memory companion.” Alongside introducing year-end Recap collages, Google Photos has in the past year received a number of new AI-assisted editing and organisation tools and features.

The Recap is also, perhaps, an early sign of the coming nostalgia scroll. In an age of 24/7 reels and timelines, a neatly presented, chronological, year-in-review is a way to stand out from the clutter and rediscover the emotional value in those memories.

For many users – both in India(BHARAT) and abroad – the implications are clear: Google Photos, as a product, is rapidly becoming less a place to just back up images, and more a “digital scrapbook,” a memory lane one can visit with a simple tap.