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A recent survey reveals a possible new design for Google Photos. Google Photos is poised for a significant visual overhaul, prioritizing automatically-created 'Memories' and a more intuitive search experience. This potential redesign was spotted in the form of a pair of screenshots in a consumer research survey on surveyjunkie.
com . The first image displays the current layout while a second details a proposed update featuring several key design alterations. April 3 update below: Google is testing a fix for a long-standing Google Photos Issue with face detection.
This article was originally published on April 2 A recent survey reveals a possible new design for Google Photos. Thanks to Telegram user @Arfus_UwU for sharing the initial findings on this potential Google Photos redesign. While Google hasn't confirmed these changes, the screenshots give us a rare insight into the company’s future design thinking.
Let’s take a look at the big changes proposed in this redesign and how a selection of small changes could bring big improvements to the app. Overall, the proposed redesign places a greater emphasis on pictures by enlarging images where possible, taking up more of the screen and minimizing distracting elements. Here’s a breakdown of the changes: Memories are given much greater prominence with much larger picture tiles, making them more engaging and easier to browse quickly.
The tiles also incorporate new text enhancements, like bolder text overlays that can pass behind objects in the photos, making monthly recaps and person-specific Memories easier to identify at a glance. In the example picture, the “Best of November” memory has been renamed to “Recap” with a large “NOV” title overlaid over a selection of pictures. Similarly, a memory for the person “Tao” now features a tighter crop and a larger name that appears to pass behind his head.
Above the Memories tiles, the colored text “Google Photos” is replaced with a less distracting monochrome version of the familiar Google Photos “pinwheel” icon. Below the Memories, the day view section now features rounded corners, lending it a friendlier look in line with Google’s Material 3 design principles . The title is now centered, and the “select all” button moved to the left of the screen making way for a new sorting or filtering tool on the right.
Individual photos now have an information overlay in the middle rather than on the right-hand side, and the “play button” icon has been removed from video thumbnails. The row of icons at the bottom of the screen has been replaced with a floating search bar. This change makes the full height of the screen available for displaying photos rather than reserving a bar at the bottom just for buttons.
The search bar is now named “Search or ask” and includes a microphone icon, encouraging users to move beyond simple Google Photos search terms and try the Ask Photos feature with voice or text input. A new section featuring four small icons is presented to the right of the search bar, presumably to access library sections such as “Photos” and “Collections” previously found at the bottom of the screen. From the look of this single photo, the proposed Google Photos redesign appears much improved.
Note, however, that the survey doesn’t actually ask which design the user prefers. Instead it asks them to rate the new design as “outdated” or “modern” on a scale of 0 to 50. This suggests that Google strongly values keeping the app fresh and modern look as well as improving usability and functionality.
April 3 update: A recent report reveals that Google is testing a Google Photos update to relieve one of the app's long-standing pain points — face detection. A recent report from Android Authority reveals that Google is redesigning the tools you use to manage people detected and tagged in photos. One of the most useful organizational features of Google Photos is its ability to recognize people’s faces and automatically sort their pictures into groups.
This function makes searching for pictures of particular people easy and enables the app to generate Memories dedicated to particular individuals. The problem is that Google Photos doesn’t always get face recognition right: I’ve seen examples of disappearing face tags and even cases where the app had incorrectly tagged hundreds of faces as the wrong person. Google provides tools for correcting these mistakes under a dedicated “Edit faces” page, but the tools are far from intuitive.
The page contains no instructions or descriptive text and relies on guesswork when using it for the first time. Now, as revealed in unreleased interface updates discovered by app specialist AssembleDebug , Google is testing a streamlined and much more intuitive method. The updated design does away with the “Edit faces” page altogether and adds a small drop-down menu to each face in the “People” section that you’ll see whenever you swipe up on a photo containing a detected person.
This menu offers just two options: “Remove from this photo” and “This is someone else.” The first option untags the person in the picture (it doesn’t edit them out of the photo!), while the second lets you correct the tag by selecting the correct person from the people the app has already recognized or by tapping “Create new” to add a new person. The changes aren’t live yet, and may never be implemented.
However, at least one user reports seeing the features live in their app temporarily., I hope Google does go ahead and roll out this change, although it appears to work only on a single photo at a time. We still need the ability to correct these tags in a group of pictures in one go.
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