Google’s latest Play System Update makes it easier to find and share photos on Android

Android’s Photo Picker allows you to selectively share photos and videos with an app, rather than granting it access to your entire media gallery. It’s a privacy-preserving tool intended for apps that only have a one-time or infrequent need for your media. While its simple two-tab UI — one for a chronological view of your media and another for your albums — is straightforward, it’s also arguably too simple, lacking many of the convenient features of Android’s older file picker. Fortunately, Google is now rolling out an update to the Photo Picker that introduces some much-needed quality-of-life improvements.

Late last week, Google began pushing the August 2025 Google Play System Update. While the official changelog was sparse, we’ve observed that the update activates a major new feature in Android’s Photo Picker: a search bar.

Following the update, I and several members of the Android Authority team noticed the new search bar appear at the top of the Photo Picker UI. As you’d expect, it lets you enter keywords to find specific images, GIFs, or videos in your local gallery. If you’ve granted the Photo Picker access to your Google Photos library, its capabilities expand further, showing recommended searches for people and places and pulling in matches from your cloud library.

While a small number of users first spotted the search bar back in July, the feature has now started reaching a much wider audience. Many Pixel users in the Android Beta and Canary programs received it in recent weeks, but the August 2025 Google Play System Update is what’s making the new Photo Picker widely available to all Android users.

Furthermore, the Photo Picker’s Albums tab (now called “Collections”) is also getting a facelift. Instead of displaying every album on your phone in one long list, it now groups local albums into “From this device” and “From your apps.” While there can be some overlap, the goal is to separate your personal folders from those created by applications. This doesn’t fully declutter the tab, as albums like Screenshots, Downloads, and cloud albums remain in the main view, but it’s a solid step toward better organization.

These changes, especially the search bar, are significant enhancements for a tool that struggled with developer adoption before Google mandated its use last year. Hopefully, Google continues to build on this momentum so users and developers won’t feel forced to use an inferior alternative to Android’s old file picker. Fortunately, we know more improvements are already in the pipeline, such as the ability to resize the photo grid, tap-and-drag to select multiple items, and quickly scroll through the gallery.