'Favorites' and 'likes' coming to Google Photos

The Google Photos development team has announced two new features coming to the service this week: a favorites function for tagging best pictures and heart button for liking snaps shared by friends.

The first forthcoming feature lets users pick "favorite" photos from their own collections, simply by clicking a new star-shaped icon that will soon appear with each shot. These pictures can then be quickly and easily accessed in a new "Favorites" album.

Mirroring social networks, Google Photos will also let users "like" photos shared by others by clicking on a heart-shaped icon. The more users decide to share photos, the more the service could morph into a kind of image-based social network. Indeed, all that would be missing is comments to make the service into an Instagram rival.

Google Photos is a free and unlimited cloud-based storage service for photos and videos, with tools for editing and sorting pictures. Google Photos is available online and via a mobile application that's free to download from Google Play (Android) and the App Store (iOS).