iOS & Google Photos: Getting Creative With Google Assistant

Start With Google Assistant & Create Custom Video Slideshows

5 min readJun 21, 2017

--

Introduction to Google Assistant

Google periodically provides special holiday “Assistant” themes. For instance, around Father’s Day, the ability to create a brief slideshow Father’s Day Movie.

This “Assistant” asks you complete two steps:

Choose the “Father”, and
Choose the “Children”

It then goes through your pictures and creates a video of your pictures containing the chosen individuals. I found that the video was either 16 seconds or 32 seconds — it just depended. And it is set to music.

Google Photos — Father’s Day Video — Default version

That, by itself, is amazing. But, with a little creativity (and not much effort), it can be so much more.

My Steps to Create A More Robust Video

Generate multiple videos (to “stitch” together a little later),
Download the created videos to the device (iPhone or iPad) Camera Roll,
Edit the videos using the iMovie app on my iPad, and
Export video from iMovie to my Camera Roll

Here’s each step explained:

Generate Multiple Videos

Simply request the Google Assistant to generate multiple videos. So, in my case, pick the same “Father” (that’s me), but different “Children”. This helps to minimize duplicates. Here’s what I did:

My 2 children — only.
My 2 children and my wife (picked as Children — doesn’t matter).
My daughter and my wife.
My son and my wife.
My son only
My daughter only

Scan the resulting videos and pick which ones I want to use — each video was 16 seconds.

Download the Videos to your iOS Device

In Google Photos — “Save” the Video (into Google Photos)

Google Photos App — Tap **Save** Created Video

Once it is Saved, the description will change to “View”

Google Photos — Video Saved, Turns to View Option

Now, download the video to your iPhone Camera Roll

Google Photo App — Access Download Option

Google Photos App — Video Downloading to Camera Roll

REPEAT this process until you have all of your generated videos saved to the iPhone Camera Roll.

Edit the Videos Using iMovie

1 — Load the Video Clips Into iMovie

Open the iMovie app (I will show this on my iPad, but the iPhone works the same way).

Select the “Video” Media option and choose your videos to import into iMovie.

iMovie — Select Video / All Videos on Camera Roll will appear

iMovie — Tap to select the video and tap check mark to add to Video compilation

iMovie — Once all videos are selected, tap “Create Movie”

2 — Detach the Default Audio Included in Each Video Clip

Once videos are loaded, it’s time to edit — very quickly! Detach the audio clip (it will be replaced shortly) and remove the “Google Photos” clip at the end of each video (we want these to flow seamlessly together!).

iMovie — Select the video clip and “Detach Audio” from each video that was imported.

iMovie — Drag audio clip off of “work zone” and it is deleted.

iMovie — Repeat Delete audio step for each video clip

3 — Clip and Delete Google’s Default Trailer

Next, we want to delete the default “trailer” that Google provides on each video it creates. This will enable the slideshow to flow seamlessly.

iMovie — Delete the Google Assistant default trailer

iMovie — Select video, position marker and then **Split** video

iMovie — Delete Split clip by selecting and dragging it out of the work zone.

4 — Add Your Own Song to the the Slideshow

You will likely want to add your own music, so we do that next.

iMovie — Pick a song you own! Streamed songs are not available for use.

iMovie — Tap “USE” to use a song in your slideshow

iMovie — song is added to your slideshow

Now you are done and we will export the video to your device Camera Roll

Export video to your Device Camera Roll

Last item — save the video to your Camera Roll and you are ready to share!

iMovie — From the Main Screen, select the Share iCon to Export Your Video

iMovie — Select Your Compression and the Video will Export to your Camera Roll

So, in a matter of minutes, I have taken a number of video clips and created ONE customized video that was about 1:20 in length. Very nice — and Google Photos / Google Assistant provides all the “clay” to work with!