Summary
- Google Photos might get a new “Sharing Activity” page, acting as a social feed for likes, comments, and shared album activity.
- This feature will make it easier to track all social interactions within your shared Google Photos albums, including who adds you to an album.
- The Storage manager tool could also get a UI update with a meter indicating how much space you can save by deleting items.
Google Photos makes it a breeze to manage your ever-growing photo library. It also has useful sharing options, including shared albums, enabling you to easily share pictures of an event or memories with your friends or family. But if you have a massive photo library and frequently share content with your loved ones, keeping track of all the likes, comments, and newly added pictures can become a challenge. Google plans to fix this with a new “Sharing Activity” page.
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The new page will seemingly act as a social feed for all Google Photos-related activity, highlighting when someone likes a shared photo, drops a comment, joins an album, adds more pictures to a shared album, etc. AssembleDebug (via Android Authority) managed to trigger the new “Sharing Activity” page in Google Photos v6.85.0.637477501 for Android. It replaced the sharing icon at the top right next to the profile photo with a notification icon.
Strings in the app indicate the “Sharing Activity” page will also show when you are added to a shared album, including the name of the person who added you.
Right now, you cannot quickly view liked photos and other social activity in your shared Google Photos album. The new “Sharing Activity” page should make this much more accessible. Google won’t deprecate the current Shared links page, though. Instead, it will seemingly be accessible through the three-dot overflow menu button from the top-right corner of the Google Photos app.
Google Photos storage manager could get a new storage meter
Source: Unsplash / Wikimedia Commons
Additionally, Google Photos could spice up the UI of its Storage manager to help you quickly figure out how much space you can reclaim. When you select a category from the “Review and delete” section, a meter will appear at the bottom, indicating how much potential storage you can free by deleting all the items. As you remove items individually, the meter will start filling up accordingly.
You can see the storage meter in action in the video below:
The new “Sharing Activity” page would be a more notable addition to Google Photos. It would allow you to stay up to date on all social activity happening across all your shared albums and pictures. Since the page is already functional, both features could soon become official.
