Google has revealed some radical changes to Google Photos.
First leaked earlier this month, this latest update brings with it a reorganized library tab designed to help you to sort and locate your photos and videos more easily. The new layout presents you with a new grid or list of content that can be filtered to show just the content you want to see according to its type.
Google Photos has a newly redesigned library interface.
The most striking change is a new carousel of buttons along the top of the screen that lets you choose from ‘All’ (photos), ‘Your albums’, ‘On device’ and ‘Shared albums’. Notably missing from this list is a button for ‘favorites’ which has now become slightly harder to find. However, your favorites do show up as an album within your search results.
Google tests new ways to import images into Google Photos.
The second big change comes to how you can manage images that aren’t currently stored on Google Photos. These could include media stored on other services or even physical media such as photo prints, film or videotapes.
Google’s new ‘Import photos’ menu presents you with a number of options:
- Copy from other services lets you bring in photos and video from services such as Facebook, iCloud, and pixieset.com.
- Digitize photos, videos, or film which helps you to convert physical media into digital content you can bring into Google Photos by linking you up with mail-in services such as capture.com.
- Copy from a camera lets you ingest content directly from an external digital camera.
- Ask friends for photos provides a link you can send to friends and family that enables them to contribute photos and videos to your albums.
- Back up your device folders allows you to select any folders on your local device and back up the contents to Google Photos.
- Scan photos with your phone brings up the external Google PhotoScan app so you can capture printed photos with your smartphone camera at maximum quality.
Lastly, Android users will soon also benefit from a new ‘screenshots’ shortcut which will make it easier to jump directly into the screenshots folder so you can find them quickly on your local device if you’ve decided not to back them up to your Google Photos library. I’ve also seen Google Photos surfacing screenshots in universal search queries on Android 12.
Also promised, and the subject of another earlier leak, is a new carousel of context-sensitive suggestion buttons that help you extract text from screenshots, search them with Google Lens or perform edits such as cropping.
The changes should be rolling out soon on Android and iOS. You can read more about the changes in Google’s official blog post.
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