Your Photos, Reimagined: Samsung Inks Exclusive Google Photos AI Deal

SEOUL, South Korea – December 29, 2025 – Samsung Electronics today announced a landmark partnership with Google that will bring the popular Google Photos service natively to its smart TV lineup, a move poised to redefine the living room as a space for personal storytelling and shared memories. Beginning in 2026, Samsung's AI-powered televisions will be the first to feature an integrated Google Photos experience, leveraging advanced artificial intelligence to transform personal photo libraries into immersive, cinematic galleries.

The collaboration marks a significant strategic maneuver in the fiercely competitive smart TV market, where manufacturers are increasingly looking beyond hardware specifications to software and ecosystem integrations as key differentiators. This integration promises more than just a simple slideshow; it aims to weave a user's most cherished moments directly into the fabric of their daily home life.

"Samsung TVs have always brought people together, and bringing Google Photos to the big screen makes that experience even more personal," said Kevin Lee, Executive Vice President of the Customer Experience Team at Samsung's Visual Display Business. "Through this partnership, we help users rediscover and relive cherished moments by bringing to light the stories behind their photos—right from the comfort of their living room."

The AI-Powered Living Room Gallery

The core of the new experience is a suite of AI-driven features designed to surface, curate, and creatively enhance a user's photo collection. The rollout is planned in three distinct phases throughout 2026.

The first feature, titled Memories, is set to launch in March 2026 and will be exclusive to Samsung TVs for its first six months. This function will automatically curate photos and videos into narrative stories based on the people, places, and significant events within a user's Google Photos library. Instead of requiring users to actively search for photos, Memories is designed for a "lean-back" experience, surfacing forgotten moments and presenting them in a new light on the home's largest screen.

Later in the year, Samsung will introduce Create with AI and Personalized Results. These more interactive tools will be powered by Nano Banana, a new image generation and editing model from Google's DeepMind AI lab. The 'Create with AI' feature will offer themed templates that can playfully transform photos. It will also include a 'Remix' function to alter an image's art style and a 'Photo to Video' tool that animates still images into short, dynamic clips. Notably, some of these creative AI templates will be exclusive to Samsung TVs, and the processing for these transformations will happen locally on the device, a detail that could assuage some privacy concerns.

'Personalized Results' will further enhance discovery by generating slideshows based on topics or content detected within a user's library, such as "hiking trips," "ocean views," or photos from a specific city like Paris. The goal is to make personal media as easy and engaging to browse as a streaming service's content library.

"We're excited to bring Google Photos to Samsung TVs—helping people enjoy their favorite photos on a larger screen and reconnect with their memories in new ways," stated Shimrit Ben-Yair, Vice President of Google Photos and Google One.

A Strategic Play in a Crowded Market

This partnership is more than a feature enhancement; it's a calculated strategic play for both Samsung and Google. For Samsung, it provides a powerful and exclusive software feature to distinguish its 2026 AI TV lineup. In a market projected to grow from $227.5 billion in 2024 to over $451 billion by 2030, differentiation is paramount. Competitors are not standing still. LG, for instance, is preparing to launch its "Gallery TV" with a subscription-based art service and its own AI tools for displaying personal photos. However, Samsung's integration leverages the ubiquity of Google Photos, a service already home to billions of user memories.

The six-month exclusivity on the 'Memories' feature is a critical component of this strategy, creating a compelling reason for consumers to choose a Samsung TV in the first half of 2026. It reflects a broader industry trend where hardware and software alliances are becoming as important as display technology itself.

For Google, the deal marks a major milestone. Despite its presence on countless mobile devices, Google Photos has been conspicuously absent as a native application on major television platforms, including Google's own Google TV interface. This partnership represents the service's first official entry into the living room's central screen, filling a long-standing gap in its ecosystem strategy and potentially paving the way for wider TV integration in the future.

Privacy and Personalization in Plain Sight

The prospect of displaying a lifetime of personal photos on a connected TV naturally raises questions about data privacy and security. The integration will require users to sign in with their Google Account, meaning both Google's and Samsung's privacy policies will govern the data. Smart TVs are already under scrutiny for their data collection practices, a reality that both companies appear to be addressing proactively.

The announcement that AI creation features will be "processed locally" on the television is a significant technical detail. By performing these image transformations on the device's own hardware rather than sending personal photos to the cloud, the companies can mitigate some privacy risks and offer users greater peace of mind. The initial focus on curated 'Memories' rather than providing unfettered access to an entire photo library also suggests a carefully managed approach to how personal data is displayed.

This balance between deep personalization and user privacy will be crucial for consumer adoption. As smart home ecosystems become more interconnected, the transparency and security of how personal data is handled will increasingly influence purchasing decisions.

Ultimately, Samsung and Google are betting that the emotional pull of reliving cherished memories on a grand scale will be a powerful draw for consumers. By transforming the television from a passive entertainment device into an active participant in a family's life story, this partnership aims to create more meaningful connections—not just between devices, but between people. It represents a future where the technology in our living rooms doesn't just show us the world, but also shows us ourselves.