
What you need to know
- Google announced an update for the Photos app that brings "video creation templates" to users.
- Users can find these templates when creating a Highlight video, which is a pre-made video, fully equipped with music, text, and beat-matching.
- Google says users can let the AI automatically grab appropriate camera roll content, or they can take over manually, and edit the resulting video with new music and more.
- YouTube Shorts also got its own version of templates, which lets content creators easily hop on the speeding train.
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Google's sprinkling in a bit of fun creativity for users interested in creating the perfect video to share with others.
The company announced that the Google Photos app is preparing to roll out "video creation templates" on Android (via 9to5Google). This new template set is said to be "smarter" and more "helpful" to the user. Google's calling these new templates "trendy" with automation and "smart media selection," capable of deciding the best shots from your camera roll that you should use.
Users can also get a little more creative with music and text.
In a support document for the feature, Google explains how to create a "Highlight Video," which can leverage these templates. Users must first navigate to Google Photos > Create > Highlight Video to get going. Once there, Google says you'll find a selection of templates, which are all "pre-made videos" that already feature music, text, and beat-matching. Once the template you want is selected, users can manually pick their photos, or let Google's automation do the work for them through "Help me select."
The manual side involves using Photos' Search, and typing in names, dates, and places.
The reviewing/editing process is where some more user creativity can come into play. Users can tap the music note icon to swap the tunes, reorder their clips, or remove them. The publication states that the new templates haven't appeared widely just yet, but that shouldn't take long to change.
A template for highlights

Google Photos celebrated its 10th birthday earlier this summer, and it looks like the company behind it isn't slowing down the new features. In September, the Photos app incorporated Veo 3's image-to-video generation technology. This gave users the ability to create short, six-second clips with incredibly high-quality, using their own imagery. The Create tab is where this all takes place, giving access to more tools, alongside the Veo 3 model.
Also, the idea of hopping on trends and templates is quite familiar following YouTube's update. Shorts gained a new feature, which gave short-form content creators a "template" button when watching other videos. In Remix, users will find a "use this template" icon that brings that trending music or sound clip into their dashboard, so they can put their own spin on things.
YouTube said it was preparing an expansion to its template feature, enabling users to grab multiple clips for videos.