Google+ gets new Android app, automatically generated photo albums

With the future of Google+ in question after the section head departed a month ago, Google’s social network has just unveiled a slew of new features.

First up is "Google+ Stories," an automated photo album creation service. Just upload all your pictures and videos to Google+, and it will automatically detect life events based on the information in the photos, like geotagging and the date taken. Google+ will then package all the photos and video together, pick out the good ones, and create a fancy photo album for others to view. Here’s an example photo album.

The photo albums appear as a horizontally scrolling scrapbook of photos, organized by day and location. Google even throws in custom Google Maps images with dotted red lines to indicate travel. Once Google+ has thrown together the basic framework of an album, users can add titles and captions to photos and tweak the layout—then it's ready to share to all of your Google+ friends.

The other major new feature is a redesigned Android app. The design is along the same lines as the colorful red design that was leaked about a month ago. The big surprise is the new layout, though. Google has completely done away with the navigation drawer, the slide-out panel of app sections that had been a standard on Android apps for the past year. The new app greatly simplifies the Google+ experience and focuses mainly on posts in the social stream.

While some Google+ fans will take these updates as a sign that the service isn't being de-emphasized at Google, these plans were in the works for some time, as demonstrated by the leak a month ago. The new design of the Google+ app might actually hold a few secrets about the future of the service. With no navigation drawer, the "extra" features of Google+, like Photos, Location, and Events, have been relegated to a tiny strip of icons at the bottom of the new navigation screen. After reading the reports by other outlets, including Re/code, that Google+ was going to be parted out to other divisions, it's easy to get the idea that these three services are being de-emphasized and might have one foot out the door.