A professional photographer wasn’t in the cards, so in the delivery room in September 2022, Byrne gave her Google Pixel to her husband, Tom. As each boy entered the world, Tom snapped a photo of their swaddled, squirming bodies. Their faces turned out sharp and still in the pictures thanks to Portrait Mode, which blurred out the background and put all the focus on her newborns’ faces. “I’m grateful for those once-in-a-lifetime moments to be captured in a way we can rely on with no worry or guessing if the photos will turn out,” Byrne says. 

For new parents, births are just the first in an endless string of photo-worthy moments that digital cameras have made easy to capture. Riley Adams, who says he’s the “unofficial photographer in the family,” has filled his Google Photos albums with thousands of pictures of his two toddlers taken with his Google Pixel. From that trove of images, he creates separate albums, one for each set of grandparents, to publish as Google Photos books and give as Christmas gifts.

“Google Photos does a remarkable job of grouping images by event, selecting the most important ones, and then organizing them into an engaging sequence in these books,” says Adams, who works as an accountant at Google.

This year, the album will contain pictures from the family’s summer trip to Poi‘pū Beach in Hawaii. Amid photos of their little ones splashing in the water at the shore, Adams says he used Portrait Mode for a picture of his wife, Lily, and their two boys to draw more attention to his favorite subjects: “my family!” Portrait Mode brings subjects to the forefront of a picture, focusing on them while blurring out everything behind them – just like in a professional photo shoot. “It has better lighting, shading, and blur,” says Adams.

To clean up the action shots of his kids, Adams relies on the #FixedOnPixel editing features on his Google Pixel. “I live by those tools,” he says. Magic Eraser has helped him put the focus back on his kids by cutting out unwanted background objects.² Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro introduced Photo Unblur in Google Photos to improve photos – new or old – from any camera. This makes it even easier to remove blur and visual noise with one tap, to make photos look their best. And once you’re done with editing, Google One offers storage for all of your photos.

Google Pixel phone features can be particularly helpful when you’re asking five family members to hold still and take a great photo. Laura McGee-Gramke can count on Face Unblur to get the best shot.¹

Every August at her house, four kids plus their dad squeeze together on the front step of the house, and their mom, Laura, snaps a picture to remember the moment. It’s the first day of a new school year.

“I always tell them, just show me what you’re feeling,” says McGee-Gramke. “I want to bottle that snapshot of our family together.” 

The oldest child, Sophie, and dad, Stephen, pose in the back, while the younger trio of Kate, Claire, and Charlie takes up the front row. Some years there are gleeful smiles, while in others, there are silly frowns. 

“Kids grow fast – the photos help me go back and feel those moments again,” McGee-Gramke says.