The Best Take feature on the Pixel 10 camera will be a lifesaver this holiday season

The holidays are a hectic time for many reasons.

The financial pressure of buying gifts, the social anxiety of seeing relatives, and the general trepidation of traveling during the busiest time of year can add up to a lot of stress for people.

To make matters worse, everyone wants to remember the magical holiday season by taking a big, hard-to-organize group picture in front of the tree.

Wrangling family members becomes a tragic exercise in futility that lasts forever because no one is smiling at the same time.

However, as I recently discovered during the Thanksgiving weekend with my family, the Best Take feature on the Google Pixel 10 can save you minutes, if not hours, of holiday picture-taking stress.

More importantly, though, it’s going to be an even bigger lifesaver during all the Christmas madness that’s just around the corner.

The value of Best Take during the holidays

Group pictures take forever without it

Surely you’ve been stuck in the absolute nightmare that is the ever-lasting group picture attempt.

Whatever gathering is taking place finally starts to gain momentum and, out of the blue, someone suggests memorializing the event with a photo.

The next few minutes are spent not conversing or bonding with the friends and family we miss so dearly, but deciding where to take the picture and whose smartphone they are going to use to take it.

As the lone Android user in a family of iPhone fanatics, that role almost exclusively falls to me because the Pixel camera is just so very great.

Over the years, the process was arduous at its best.

Finding a place to mount the phone, getting everyone in place, and insisting certain family members take off their glasses are enough to bring any holiday party to a screeching halt.

Then, taking the actual picture is a whole thing too. Everyone has opinions on flash, landscape versus portrait, or whether we should be smiling or “doing a silly one.”

This Thanksgiving, I made a point to not only use, but to inform everyone that I would be using, the Best Take feature on the Pixel 10.

This meant that, regardless of how everyone looked or how we took the picture, I would be taking everyone’s best face and creating one excellently edited picture to pass along in the group chat when we’re done.

This immediately made the entire group photo experience more tolerable.

For one, we know we’d get a good picture because we have several options.

On top of that, with everyone knowing that the Best Take feature was being used, it created an infinitely more relaxed vibe for everyone involved.

No one was trying to force a smile or convince a toddler to take their hair out of their mouth, and the candid smiles shone through a lot better.

More importantly, if someone didn’t like how they looked, they had several chances to get it right, so it’s kind of on them.

How to use the Best Take feature

The Pixel 10 makes it almost too easy

The holidays are bearing down on us pretty fast, so I’ll be as quick as possible when I explain how to take advantage of this group picture-saving feature.

For starters, you can only use the feature on a series of photos (three or more) that were taken within 10 seconds of each other.

You’ll also want to make sure that Motion Photos is enabled on your device and that the photo in question features multiple faces to swap.

After you’ve found that, click the Edit button at the bottom of the display and select the Actions tab. Scroll over until you find the Best Take tile and click it to get started.

You’ll then be presented with a number of face options for every person in the picture. Choose the one that looks best, and enjoy your nearly flawless group picture without the stress.

The Pixel camera to the rescue

High-quality pictures without a lot of effort

Best Take is one of the most convenient features available with the Pixel 10 camera, but it’s far from the only option that can make your holidays easier this year.

From the Magic Eraser tool that can remove unwanted items in the background to the AI Enhance feature that can improve the lighting, framing, and composition of your image without so much as a prompt, the Pixel camera is designed to facilitate high-quality photos without the whole to-do.

And if you don’t care about the quality of your photos during the holidays, you can still take advantage of them, if only so that the group photo doesn’t take so long that you miss out on watching the NFL on Netflix on Christmas Day.