I’m not a huge photo person, unlike many of my colleagues at Android Police.
It makes Google’s job easier because it allows the company to do the bare minimum in Google Photos and still get away with it.
I’m not an advanced Google Photos user, but I’m sure there is a sizable population that wants to squeeze everything out of the app.
That’s not my goal, because I don’t need that many features for what I need the Google Photos app for.
While the advanced features are a great show of Google Photos’ strength, casual users like me may not need to learn each one of them to get the best performance out of it.
I recently followed a completely different tactic.
I made some tweaks to how I use certain features in Google Photos, and it made all the difference. I dropped these four habits, and Google Photos became way better.
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Ignoring the white circle
I’m not proud of it, but I came across this feature much later than I should have. But now that I learned the trick from my partner on vacation, there is no point in not using it.
The small circle with a checkmark appears on the right side of Google Photos. It’s not a cosmetic thing.
Instead, it has a real purpose: to allow users to quickly share their photos and videos with someone.
Instead of selecting photos and videos by tapping them individually, you can bulk select your shots using the circle, and it does it rather smartly.
These circles appear beside every date that you clicked pictures or shot videos. The purpose here is to let you bulk select everything that you clicked on that day.
Even if you want to exclude some photos, the bulk selection helps in the sense that you can tap the photos and videos you don’t want to send after tapping the circle. This is way better than selecting each individually.
Although it takes time to get used to this, there is no going back to the old way.
However, I don’t love how the circle appears on Google Photos. For what it does, it should be more prominent. Maybe it should grow a little bigger and move closer to the date.
I won’t be unhappy if Google doesn’t do it, because I finally know how to find it.
Ignoring gesture
Menus and buttons are great and probably the easiest ways to access a piece of software, and they work for everyone.
However, that doesn’t take anything away from how great gestures work throughout Android.
Google Photos demonstrates the power of gestures on Android. It also covers the failure of menus and buttons in many ways.
For example, if you are a lefty, your thumb will find it difficult to reach the white circle on the right side of the screen.
In that case, you can simply tap and hold the date to select all the photos and videos that you took.
I’m not a lefty, but I use this gesture when I need to bulk select shots on a given day while holding the phone in my left hand.
More than this, I love the swipe gestures on Google Photos. To bulk select the entire row, I tap and hold the first or last item in the row and then swipe left or right.
To bulk select photos across different dates while skipping a few shots, I tap and hold the last photo I want, and then swipe up to cover the rows I need.
Similarly, you can swipe down to cover the rows you want to select.
Another gesture I use is one-handed zoom. Instead of using double-tap or pinch, I tap twice, hold my thumb down on the second tap, and swipe down to zoom in and swipe up to zoom out.
On the photo viewer screen, you can also swipe up to reveal the details of the phone, including the size of the photo and the space that it occupies, where it’s taken, and more.
This is the most effective way to control zoom in situations where you can’t use both hands. For me, this is when I’m eating or walking.
Never reviewing Google Photos’ Memories
I’m not the person who lives in the past, but I don’t mind going down memory lane to think about all the happy moments that I captured with my phone.
Google Photos’ Memories makes it easy for me. The feature automatically creates collections of your past photos and shows them as highlights at the top of the Google Photos app.
A couple of days ago, it highlighted a selfie that I took after coming out of the salon and cheering on what I’d now consider a weird hairstyle.
I don’t know if there is a word for a mix of embarrassment and fun, but that’s exactly what I felt after watching the highlight.
However, not everything brings happy memories, and I regret not telling Google not to show them further as highlights on its Photos app.
You can remove the photo from Google Photos, and that will automatically remove it from the Memories. On top of that, you can also remove the shots you no longer want the Memories to highlight.
Both these options are available under the three-dot menu that appears in the lower-right corner of the Memory viewer.
It’s a shame that YouTube Music still doesn’t have a scrollbar in its music library, making it difficult to find songs that I saved a long time ago in my huge playlist.
No such problems exist in Google Photos. The scrollbar appears right after you start scrolling on Google Photos. You can drag the scrollbar to quickly find what you are looking for.
It’s the best way to scroll back several years because the scrollbar shows the years on your screen as you drag it.
You instantly know how much you need to drag to quickly access photos from a certain timeline.
The dedicated scrollbar appears on the right side of the screen, so it works best for right-handed users like me.
Google Photos isn’t easy to replace, even for advanced users
Many of my colleagues who take photos almost every day replaced Google Photos with open-source alternatives like Immich, Fossify, and more.
However, not everyone was happy about the transition and switched back to Google Photos.
Everyone had some unique reasons why they came back to the Photos app, but the most common one was ease of use, or the lack of it in the alternatives.
In addition to the convenience factor, Google Photos packs some seriously powerful tools that help you take perfect pictures on your Android phone. Google Photos can also help you remove objects from photos with its generative AI features.
Since it is preinstalled on almost all Android phones, most people get used to Google’s photo management system over time.
Google Photos is also deeply integrated into the Android system, so it’s hard to ignore, let alone replace with something else.
I don’t need to think about any of these, because I never felt the need to switch and probably never will.
Instead, I focus on adapting to the newer, smarter ways that Google Photos lets me use the features that matter to me.
