Google’s Photos app has become fairly popular since its inception back in mid-2015, surpassing a good number of photo management and gallery apps out there, such as Quickpic and Piktures, that regularly found themselves in “best gallery app” lineups from various sites. As a popular app, of course, it receives regular updates to keep the functionality fresh and keep the design and features in line with what users expect and want, as well as to keep things secure. This app does, after all, have the capability to back up every photo you take to Google’s servers. A new update today, following a big update to the desktop version, doesn’t bring a whole lot of new stuff to the table.
A few design refinements are present here and there, with the flagship feature of the update being the replacement of swiping left and right to change screens with a bottom bar. Previously, swiping left and right would take you to between the assistant screen, your main gallery and the collections screen. This is now taken care of by a navigation bar of sorts on the bottom. Using the bar will take you to all of the places that swiping did before and the swipe functionality is now gone, which should cut down on incidents of ending up on another screen when you simply wanted to scroll quickly through your photos. A number of under-the-hood fixes, mainly performance increases, also found their way into today’s update. Aside from those small changes, the update doesn’t bring anything user-facing as far as new features go.
Although today’s update was rather meager, new features are likely coming down the pipeline soon, if the update to the web version of Google Photos was any indication. No timeline was given as to when some of the new editing features that hit the desktop this morning will be coming to the mobile version of the app. Today’s update is a small change, but paves the way for a future redesign and the addition of more features and a more intuitive interface. If you’d like to see it for yourself, hit up the source link and give it a download.
