Google Photos is testing a fancy new multi-select and sharing workflow

It looks like it’s a server-side change

Despite Google Photos no longer being completely free to use, it’s still the go-to platform if you just want to back up your images without giving the organization much thought. Sometimes you still need to manually tweak your library, though, be it to delete bad shots, share your favorite holiday pictures, or to add images to an album. That’s where hold-to-select comes in, and it looks like Google is currently rolling out a much-improved version of the context menu that opens when you select one or more images.

Image Gallery (4 Images)

New look.

As we spotted in one of the latest stable versions of Photos, 5.70.0.413477203, a new bottom sheet that slides up after selecting images makes it much easier to reach all options. When you start selecting images, you get thumb-friendly access to sharing via other apps, adding to albums, trashing, archiving, deleting from the device (while keeping the backup in the cloud), editing the location, and moving an image to the locked folder.

Image Gallery (3 Images)

Previous look.

When you pull up the bottom sheet further, you get a row of often-contacted people you can send images to via Google Photos itself. There’s also a carousel of recently edited albums you can add your selection to with a single tap.

The only thing remaining at the top of the screen is a counter showing you how many images you’ve selected and an option to discard the selection. The new workflow also makes it easy to choose all images from a given day (or month, depending on your zoom level) thanks to a new checkbox to the right of date titles. You could previously already tap and hold the title to select all images from that date, but the new checkbox makes that functionality much easier to discover.

Compared to the previous selection workflow, this new experiment is a more than welcome improvement. The old version required you to reach all the way to the top to work with the given selection, making the process a two-handed ordeal on most newer phones that tend to come with big, long screens.

So far, we’ve only seen this new interface on one of our phones running Photos version 5.70.0.413477203 installed. We haven’t been lucky with other devices, so we presume that it’s a limited test for now. You can try enabling it for yourself by force stopping and restarting the Photos app from the app info screen to see if that does anything, but there’s no guarantee that this will help. In any case, be sure to always update to the latest version for a chance to get in on experiments like this.

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Manuel Vonau (1518 Articles Published)

Manuel is a tech enthusiast and Android fan based in Berlin. When he's not writing articles for Android Police, he's probably out and about as a videographer.

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