Play Google Photos Memories on your Smart TV

Why Memories aren't on TV (and what's possible instead)

The 'For You' tab in the Google Photos app — birthdays, anniversaries, 'rediscover this day', 'you and X over the years' — is generated inside the Google Photos app itself. It is not data exposed in any API endpoint that a third-party app like Easy Photo Player could call. Apple TV Memories work because Apple controls Apple TV and iCloud at the same time. Google could publish a Memories API for Android TV, Samsung Tizen, and LG webOS apps, but it has chosen not to. So if you want birthdays, anniversaries, or year-ago slideshows on the TV today, you either build them yourself with an album or you let the picker's search do the work.

The picker search understands full phrases, not just single words

When you open the Easy Photo Player picker on your phone or computer, there's a search bar at the top — the same Google Photos search you'd use in the Photos app. It reaches the entire library, including faces and places Google has tagged. The important thing — and the part most people don't realise — is that the search is not limited to single words. It understands full natural-language phrases, exactly the kind the Memories feed uses on your phone: 'one year ago this day', 'you and Anna over the years', 'birthdays over time', 'wedding 2023', 'family holidays in Italy', 'Anna and Mark together'. Google's machine-vision tags every photo in the background, so once a face is face-tagged or a place is geotagged, the matching set comes back immediately. It's not the auto-rolling Memories feed, but the underlying material — and the way you reach it — is identical.

Search route: build a slideshow in three taps

1. Open the Easy Photo Player picker on your phone or computer — the same one you used when first linking the TV. 2. Type the search you want into the search bar: a phrase like 'one year ago this day', a name, a year, a place, or any combination. 3. Click the first photo, shift+click the last photo to select everything in between in a single click, then 'Done'. The TV updates within a few seconds. Total time: under a minute. You can swap the theme whenever — 'Christmas 2024' on Christmas Eve, 'beach' on a sunny afternoon, 'kids over the years' for a Sunday evening.

Album route: for stable, named themes

If you've found a search you'll want again and again — 'kids', 'Mum and Dad', 'summer trips' — copy those photos into a Google Photos album with the same name. The picker lists your albums, and when you open one inside the picker, Google shows a 'Select all' button right there: one tap and the entire album is in your TV slideshow. (The shift+click trick is only needed in search results — Google's album view has its own select-all.) New photos added to the album later don't auto-sync to the TV yet (we're working on it), so you'd re-open the album in the picker every now and then. Use the album route for stable themes you want bookmarked, and the search route for spontaneous mood-driven slideshows.

Frequently Asked Questions