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Google Photos on Android gets a redesigned ‘albums’ tab

Google Photos on Android gets a redesigned ‘albums’ tab

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Google Photos

It’s now just a tiny bit simpler to find your way around Google Photos on Android.

In an update today, Google has reworked the app’s “albums” tab to make it easier to explore all of the photos on your device. The tab is now split into three sections: one allows you to explore your camera roll in different ways (sorting places by location or people, for instance), another section will let you dive into photos taken inside of other apps, and the third section shows your actual photo albums.

“Albums” is almost a misnomer now

The complexity almost makes “albums” a misnomer for this tab, but it’s definitely a helpful change. For one, getting to photos stored in other apps used to require diving into a menu, so this saves a step. And while those other two sections (your albums and exploration options) were already inside the albums tab before this update, they’re now presented in ways that are a bit easier to view.

Instead of being represented by full-width photos, albums are now shown as squares, which lets you see twice as many at once. The exploration section is much more noticeable, too. Before, it was a narrow, ignorable bar at the top of the screen. Now it’s displayed more prominently, and example photos are shown in a grid to illustrate what you’ll find after tapping in.

You can see a comparison below. The old version is on the left, the new version on the right.