Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google devs have been cooking up a new look for how you share pics in Photos.
- The in-development sharing interface features a larger, animated carousel of images.
- We could lose some functionality along the way, however, including the ability to easily modify image selections.
Modern software is never truly “done.” With the days of physical media far behind us, and digital distribution the not-even-new-anymore normal, if you’re not constantly updating your app, you may as well have abandoned it. Google devs are constantly tweaking the company’s core suite of Android apps, always trying out new workflows and UI optimizations. Today we’re checking out some of the latest changes in the works for Photos.
Half the fun of taking pictures is sharing them with others, so it’s little surprise that the Photos places a big emphasis on sharing tools. With version 7.59 of Google Photos, combined with Android 16 QPR3 Beta 2, we’ve spotted Google playing with a revised interface for how you select those pics that you want to share.
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As Photos exists right now, after selecting multiple shots from your gallery, and hitting the share icon, a carousel sheet slides up from the bottom of the screen so you can review your choices. here’s how that looks in action:
While that works perfectly fine, with Photos 7.59 we’re able to get an early look at an in-development, slightly revised UI, taking up the whole screen and scaling the size of your pics as you scroll through them:
So, just a different way of doing the same thing? Well, not exactly. Currently, if you’re about to share a group of pics but realize you want to swap one out, you can hit that “Modify” button in the top-right and quickly make your changes.
With the new interface Google is working on, we appear to be losing that “Modify” option. Instead, if you need to change which images you have selected, it looks like Google’s making us go back and choose them all over again.
There are some other minor tweaks to how this interface operates, but they’re largely without consequence — the division between the carousel and sharing targets, sharing links being labeled and appearing slightly differently — losing “Modify” is the only one we’ve really got any feelings about.
As with all in-development app updates, though, it’s important to remember that nothing’s set in stone, and maybe even that one complaint will be addressed before any of this goes live. Remember, we’re also only seeing this on devices running QPR3 Beta 2, so we may not witness any of this go live until the next Pixel Drop.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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