Google Nest cameras just got a major fix that users have been asking for

Google Home is giving its app a spring update, and it’s Google Nest users who will benefit the most. Available to all users, Google Nest security cameras now have better controls, video filtering, animated previews, and even the Familiar Faces feature has been ‘fixed’ – here’s everything you need to know.

In an effort to modernise your camera experience, Google has improved its app controls to make it easier for users to see and scroll through their video events. The app has not only been improved to be much faster and smoother to use, but it has a new event details page that’s easier to view and swipe between.

On the event details page, the video player remains visible and can be resized as you scroll through clips and video history. It's much less laggy than before, and Nest camera users can now swipe left and right to switch between Events and Timeline, and swipe down to close the camera.

What’s even better is Google has improved its ‘quick seek’ buttons so you can now easily skip forwards and backwards in your video recordings by 10 seconds each way.

The next handy feature from Google Home’s spring update is zoomed-in animated previews. These previews allow users to view specific actions through a preview, like people, pets, packages and vehicles. It also has improved video filtering so you can quickly search events with terms like ‘Glass break’ or ‘Person seen’.

The updated timeline view in the app also gives descriptions of events so you don’t have to spend ages scrolling through footage.

Now on to the ‘fix’ that Nest camera users have been waiting for. Its Familiar Faces feature uses facial recognition and a library of faces to recognise people in your footage and tell you who they are. But since its launch, the feature has been unreliable at times but Google’s spring update is here to change that.

Familiar Faces in the Google Home app will now remove low-quality images from your face library to keep it tidy and accurate. This includes blurriness, side or small views, so you can now get more reliable alerts for who’s at your home. To improve the feature further, users can now give feedback by clicking thumbs up or thumbs down buttons on Familiar Faces previews.

The Google Home spring update is available to all users. For some of these features, like event descriptions, you may need a Google Home Premium subscription.