Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Android’s Photo Picker is getting a new search bar to help find specific images, and a date scrubber is also in development to make navigation easier.
- The search feature, which is rolling out now, allows users to search their entire local and cloud media library with simple text-based queries.
- A date scrubber is also being worked on, which will let users quickly scroll through their gallery to find photos from a specific month or year.
Sharing a photo or a funny image with a friend on Android is easy thanks to the system’s centralized share sheet. The process is straightforward: find the image, tap share, pick an app, and select a contact. While sharing itself is quick, locating the specific image you want can take time if you need to wade through your entire local and cloud gallery. To solve this, Google is updating Android’s Photo Picker with a new search function and is also preparing a much-needed date scrubber.
If you’re unfamiliar, the Photo Picker is a special, privacy-focused interface that appears in many apps when you try to select an image, GIF, or video. Rather than giving apps full access to your media library, the Photo Picker lets you grant access to specific items you choose.
Google introduced the Photo Picker with the Android 13 update in 2022, but app adoption was slow. This was largely because it lacked key features, such as integration with Google Photos and a search bar to sift through your gallery. The Photo Picker gained cloud media support early last year, and Google said to expect search support sometime in 2024 as well. Search support never ended up rolling out in 2024, but it’s finally starting to arrive on some users’ devices.
Late last week, several users informed me that a search bar has appeared in their Photo Picker. It sits above the “Photos” and “Collections” tabs, which now have icons next to their text labels. Tapping the search bar expands the interface and brings up the keyboard, allowing you to search your local and cloud media with a text query. Your most recent searches appear just below the search box, with suggested queries in a separate section below that.
Our initial tipster, THE _NO_NAME on Telegram, didn’t share screenshots of the full experience to preserve their privacy. However, we got a complete look at the feature when it reached Android Authority contributor Kamila Wojciechowska’s device back in April. As you can see, the search feature is quite basic, resembling the “classic” search in Google Photos rather than the newer “Ask Photos” experience. Still, it’s a much-needed addition, as finding a specific image without it requires you to remember which collection it’s in or roughly when you saved it.
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
For those times when you know when an image was taken, scrolling to the right month is an option, but it can be tedious if your gallery is large. To address this, Google is also working on a date scrubber. While we don’t have images of this feature in the Photo Picker yet, it will likely resemble the one in Google Photos. There, a scrubber appears when you scroll, which you can drag to quickly navigate to a specific month or even a past year.
We don’t know when Google will release the date scrubber, but the search bar is already rolling out now. So far, we’ve only heard from a few people about receiving it, all of whom are Pixel users on Android 16, but we don’t believe the feature is tied to a specific OS version. Instead, it appears to be a server-side update rolling out to users with the latest Google Play System Update and Google Photos releases.
