Google Photos may finally let you choose when your pictures are backed up

Since Google announced Material 3 Expressive, the new design language has been slowly rolling out to the company’s apps. Its next destination will be the backup settings in Google Photos. And it looks like this refresh will bring a long-requested new feature with it.

The Backup page in Google Photos is where you go to control how your photos are stored in the cloud. Here you can toggle the feature on or off, choose to only back up your favorites, pick the quality you want your photos to be saved in, and so on. Through our APK teardown of the Google Photos app (version 7.58.0.853810532), we spotted that this page is getting revamped with Expressive UI.

Options like Backup Mode, Backup quality, and Back up device folder are now in containers. These options are also separated by new headings, including “How to back up,” “What to back up,” and “Backup tools.” Overall, this update cleans up the page a bit and makes it look a little nicer than before.

If you direct your attention to the screenshots of the new UI, you’ll notice that there’s a new feature that wasn’t there before under Backup tools. This new feature is called Backup schedule. Presumably, this feature would let you set a specific time to upload photos or set a time frame, like daily, weekly, or monthly. It’s also possible that it could be similar to the Backup schedule for Android. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find many clues in the code to explain what Google is up to.

For years, users have been asking for the ability to set a specific time for when photos are backed up (1, 2, 3, 4). Here’s to hoping that this feature turns out to be exactly what users wanted.