Check Out The Amazing Photo Tool From Google That You Should Start Using Right Now

It's a common problem: You'll go on a vacation or have an amazing weekend with your friends where you snap a gazillion photos, but then you'll never take the time to organize them. Or, you'll create a photo album months later and have trouble remembering specific spots or location names.

That's where Google Stories comes in. Google will automatically choose your best photos from a trip or event and arrange them in a fun timeline that you can edit and add captions to. You can then share it through Google+.

Weaving together your photos, videos, and places you visited, it essentially makes you a digital scrapbook, a gorgeous travelogue that takes zero effort. Google knows the window for sharing photos is small, so each custom Story will be generated quickly and automatically and you'll get a Google+ notification when it's ready.

To get started, first turn on Google Location History, which allows Google to periodically store your smartphone's most recent location data (here's how to do that for Android or iOS). You can also share any photos that you have in Google Drive with Google+ (they will be private unless you choose to share them).

Use "Auto Backup," which will save all the photos you take on your phone to Google+ (here's how you can turn it on). Google's Auto Awesome feature which will be on by default, but here's how to check that you didn't turn it off.

Then just take a ton of photos!

Google's algorithms will automatically use all that data to create a story. It's that simple.

What does a Story actually end up looking like?

Check out this example by paraglider pilot Thomas de Dorlodot:

Stories start with a "front page" to introduce them. You can customize the title to be anything you want:

Google will automatically pull out your best photos and put them in the order they were taken. You can add your own captions to create a fun and cohesive narrative:

If you moved from place to place, Google will add fun animation to represent your travel:

And each location will be noted along with your photos to make remembering your trip even easier:

Although that gives you a taste of what de Dorlodot's story was like, check out the live version here for an even better understanding. Google launched this tool in May.