Google’s annual Photos Recap has returned for 2025 with a handful of new trimmings meant to make the year-in-review feel more personal, more editable and — yes — slightly more data-driven. The Recap, which appears at the front of the Memories carousel and will stay pinned in the Collections tab through December, now surfaces a small suite of insights (one of them: exactly how many selfies you took), offers an export button to CapCut for quick editing, and gives people the power to exclude photos or faces they’d rather not parade in an end-of-year highlight reel.

If you’ve been skimming your camera roll in secret, there’s a mild possibility the Recap will humble you: Google added a selfie counter to the 2025 package. The company says Recap will show familiar stats — top people, total photo count — and now the tally of self-portraits you’ve snapped, a stat that’s almost certainly produced by Google’s face-grouping and recognition systems. It’s the kind of small, personal insight that reads like a quiz result: amusing, a touch mortifying, and oddly compelling to share.

Not all of the Recap’s smarts are limited to counting noses and smiles. In the US, users who have opted into Gemini features inside Photos will see their “standout hobbies and top highlights” called out by the recap — essentially a short list of the things Google’s models inferred you spent a lot of time doing or photographing over the year. That’s an explicit nudge toward framing the recap as a narrative of habits, not just a collection of favorites.

Google’s product post stresses user control — perhaps the most consequential change this year. You can now hide specific people or individual photos from the Recap and then regenerate a version that reflects those exclusions. It’s a small but practical concession: people often don’t want certain faces or awkward phases to show up in a shareable montage, and the new flow treats the recap as something you can curate rather than just receive. The company even points users to a way to request a Recap if one doesn’t appear automatically.

Where the Recap used to end with a single highlight video, Google has broadened the finish line: after the presentation, you’ll find a carousel of short videos and collages automatically culled from your highlights — bite-sized pieces designed for the mechanics of social apps and group chats. There’s also a fresh, small mercy for people who prefer WhatsApp: Recaps (or their trimmed pieces) can now be shared directly to your WhatsApp Status. And if you want to tinker before you share, an “Edit with CapCut” button exports your recap into CapCut, bringing “exclusive Google Photos templates” into the editing workflow so you can customize pacing, filters and music without starting from scratch. In short, Google wants you to both keep the Recap for yourself and get it ready to post.

There’s a clear design idea behind these moves — turn a personal archive into a portable story. The Recap format Google launched last year leaned into flashy graphics and quick stats (some observers called it a riff on Spotify Wrapped), and the 2025 updates double down on that social-ready design while giving users the agency to prune what shows up. That tension — between algorithmic storytelling and individual control — is exactly what a lot of modern consumer AI products are trying to manage.

But a feature that counts faces, surfaces hobbies and recommends what to share also raises obvious privacy questions. Google’s post notes that Gemini-powered Recap content is limited in scope (Gemini-powered highlights are gated to users in the US who opt in), and the company explicitly flags that some summaries are generated by its AI models. That transparency is helpful, but it doesn’t change the underlying mechanics: these recaps are built on face-grouping, pattern recognition and inference — tools that can be useful and delightful, but which also rely on linking image content to inferred behaviors. If you’re uneasy about that, the new hide-and-regenerate option gives you at least one practical lever of control.

For the casual user, the updated Recap is mostly an entertaining annual ritual — a short, designer-friendly edit of your year that’s easy to rework and share. For anyone who cares about how their images are labeled and used, it’s a reminder to check the Photos settings: whether face groups are enabled, whether you’ve opted into Gemini features, and who can see what you share. Google’s support pages walk through exactly where the Recap lives in the app and how to find it in the Memories carousel if it doesn’t appear automatically.

If you want to try it, the Recap started showing up in early December and will be available in your Photos app through the rest of the month — a tidy way to close out 2025, whether you’re tallying travel photos, counting pets, or discovering that you took more selfies than you thought.