4 reasons I prefer Google’s other, lesser-known photo app

Google Photos has revolutionized how people think about taking pictures on their smartphone, both in terms of storage and in the variety of free editing features the app offers. Essentially, because Google Photos uploads and saves your photos in the background, you can freely delete them from your smartphone to clear up storage. The app’s editing features now also go well beyond cropping or adjusting white balance to include a host of Gemini-powered skills.

All of that makes Google Photos more of a service than an app, and one that drives you towards other Google products that the company makes money from. Ironically, Google offers another photo app that offers the ease of using Google Photos without all the unnecessary extras. It’s called Google Gallery, and here’s four reasons why it deserves a spot on your phone.

It’s entirely offline

There’s no need to worry about the cloud

Google Photos offers plenty of unique features, but its primary role is to be an automatic cloud backup of your favorite photos. That set-it-and-forget-it quality is great for record keeping, but less good if you want to easily access your photos without an internet connection. That’s something you might have trouble doing with Google Photos.

That’s not something you’ll ever run into with Google Gallery, because it works entirely offline. The app is expressly designed to access the images stored locally on your phone. That can make loading and viewing your photos much faster than it can be with Google Photos over a slow connection for photos that aren’t cached on your phone. It’s a great option if you don’t want to make thinking about network settings part of your photo viewing experience.

There’s no upsell

Cloud services have to pay for servers

Contrary to how it might seem, Google Photos is not free for Google to run. Photos take up server space, and constantly uploading and downloading your images doesn’t come without costs, be they on the technical side, or simply energy costs. Google collects fees to pay for those costs by getting customers to pay for more storage or pay for prints of their photos. Normally, the company would use your data to inform advertising or future, but Google is explicitly not doing that in favor of selling subscriptions.

You don’t have to deal with any of that if you use Google Gallery. It’s incredibly free and much simpler. It’s an app, rather than a service. There’s nothing to upkeep (or much less at the very least), so you get a purer distillation of what a photo viewing app should be.

Your photos are your own

No Al to train or security to worry about

That same logic extends to your photos. In Google Gallery, they can’t be fed to AI or exposed in a security breach because they never leave your phone, unlike the ones stored in Google Photos. To Google’s credit, the company is pretty clear that it never uses personal data stored in Google Photos to train AI, but you’re still introducing an element of vulnerability that isn’t present in a normal app.

Google Gallery ultimately does a lot less than Google Photos, because it isn’t processing your snapshots in any real sense, but it also doesn’t have any of these problems by default.

It still has the functionality you need

Photo viewing and editing features

Gallery offers only the most bare-bones software features, but you still get what you need. The app makes it easy to swipe and zoom through photos, which is what you likely want to do with your photo app. Gallery even includes simple editing options so that you can filter your photos before uploading them to social media. The key thing here is that it’s very easy to use, and you don’t lose out on the things you need, like sharing options.

Google Photos offers many more features in terms of organizing and sorting your images, including letting AI find whatever photo you’re looking for. The app also supports a variety of Gemini-powered editing features that you’ll likely never get on Google Gallery. You’ll know better than me as far as what you need, but if all you care about is viewing your photos, you’ll get what you need from the Gallery app.

Sometimes the right app for the job is the basic one

Google makes a variety of apps for Android, and many of them connect to a larger service that supports the company’s cloud and advertising business. That, unfortunately, makes it hard to find apps that don’t have a larger agenda. Gallery is one of the few that’s as simple as it appears, and that’s a good thing.

Developer

Google

Subscription cost

N/A

Rollover Credits

N/A

Offline downloads

Can only view offline image library

Google’s Gallery app is a simple photo viewer and editor without the multitude of AI-powered features of Google Photos.

If you’re interested in new apps and features introduced alongside the Pixel 10, Pocket-lint has you covered. And if you’re curious about the specific advantages of Google Photos, there are good reasons to stick with the app, especially with all the new features it’s gotten in the last few months.