If you’ve got an extensive photo library — and who doesn’t these days? — it might be hard to keep track of exactly where everything’s coming from. To help with that dilemma, Google has updated the ‘Info’ panel in Photos to show more two bits of information about each file.
These are ‘uploaded from’ and ‘shared by.’ As their names suggest, both pieces of metadata are designed to help you narrow down an image’s provenance with greater specificity.
The ‘uploaded from’ field shows whether the image was uploaded via an Android or iOS device, the web, or Google Drive. ‘Shared by,’ meanwhile, does exactly what it sounds like, and tells you which album the shared image comes from. It also tells you if the image has been saved to your own library.
The feature should be available to everyone using the Google Photos web app. The iOS and Android native apps, however, do not currently have these added bits of detail, and since it is a relatively minor change, there’s no word from Google on when/if it plans to bring feature parity to the mobile apps.
