Much better than having to hunt them down in the current interface
Google Photos may be a wonderful tool for storing and editing photos of your loved ones, but it’s pretty cumbersome when you want to access images saved locally on your phone. To get to those, you need to know that they’re hidden in the unintuitively named “Library” bottom tab, and then find them in the unassuming “Photos on device” carousel. As spotted by the Google News Telegram group, Google is looking to make things easier for screenshots and possibly other device folders, with a shortcut located right at the top of the Photos home screen.
Looking at the examples shared by Telegram members, quick access to screenshots will live in a hard-to-miss shortcut either at the very top of the app or right below the highlights carousel. It gives you an indicator when new images have been added to the folder, so it’s possible that the shortcut will only show up if you’ve just taken a few screenshots — which would still be handy, because many people probably only look for screenshots then, as to share or edit them.
While it’s questionable why screenshots would deserve such a prominent place in Photos, it makes sense when you think about how convoluted accessing them and other offline images usually is in the app. The new card might not be limited to screenshots only, either. Google Photos could look at which folders were recently updated with new images and push these to the app’s home screen, though we haven’t seen examples of this just yet. Maybe Photos could even use this card to recommend any newly updated shared albums or other galleries that it thinks you might want to look at, using some machine learning.
Compared to other recent additions to Photos that mostly revolved around upselling free users by advertising photo prints and exclusive Google One features, this is a refreshing user-centric change. Another update to the Photos app made it possible to change an image’s date and time right in the app without forcing you to switch to the web app on desktop, so it would seem like the Photos team is finally focusing on improving the user experience again. The Android application also recently received its Material You makeover, complete with funky new widgets for your home screen.
It looks like the shortcut is rolling out as a server-side update to the latest versions of Photos (starting with 5.66.0.406885096), so if you can’t see it on your phone yet, you’ll need to be patient.
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