Google is testing a powerful upgrade to one of Google Photos’ most useful features
Google is testing a new Google Photos upgrade that could dramatically improve one of its best features, according to a new report.
Well-known app researcher Assemble Debug recently revealed that Google has begun testing an important update feature that helps users reduce clutter by grouping selected photos into “pins.”
Google Photos can already do this automatically for you if you select the “Stack similar photos” option in your settings, but it doesn’t give you control over which photos get moved into the stacks. However, Google now appears to be expanding the feature by allowing users to manually select and stack photos.
This much-needed improvement would make the feature significantly more powerful, but it would also potentially cause some issues.
Google Photos photo groups: What do they do?
If you have photo aggregation enabled, Google will make an educated guess about which photos to aggregate based on recognition of similar content and photos taken in sequence. Grouping photos in this way can significantly clean up your library if you have a lot of very similar photos, for example, if you like to take several photos when trying to capture that perfect selfie.
One picture in each stack is automatically selected as the “top selection” image, which will always appear at the top of the stack when scrolling through your library. You can then manually change the top selection to ensure that only your favorite selfie is displayed; the other pictures are safely placed on the stack.
Using stacks in this way can remove a huge amount of clutter from your photo library as you’ll only see the top selections as you scroll, not hundreds of duplicates nearby.
Google Photos Stacks Photos: Giving users more control
One problem with this automatic approach is that Google Photos doesn’t always collect the photos you want. Sometimes, you may want to combine a group of photos with very different looks or photos taken further apart in time. Currently, the only way to manually group such images is to create a new album for each group. However, this wouldn’t help clutter your library, because each photo would still occupy a place in your timeline based on when you took it.
Allowing users to create stacks manually will allow them to correct any mistakes in the Google Photos stack selections and build new stacks from scratch.
Google Photos Photo Groups: Potential Issues
This feature upgrade isn’t live yet, so we don’t know if Google will limit which photos you can manually add to a photo stack, but I can foresee potential problems if the feature isn’t used carefully.
Unwittingly grouping random photos into stacks can make it very difficult to find them later, as you may have to open your photo sets one by one to look for a missing photo. Additionally, if you scroll through your timeline to browse images taken on a particular date, any photos you’ve moved to Photo Stacks may not be visible. Moving a photo into a stack hides it from the timeline, making it much harder to find.
The code found inside the Google Photos Android app reads as follows:
“<string name="photos_allphotos_menu_cleangrid_manual_grouping">Rivoj fotot</string>“
That’s not a lot of information to work with, so we’ll have to wait and see if Google decides to roll out this Photo Stacks upgrade. Giving users more control is great as long as there isn’t too much potential to mess things up. Another recent leak reveals that Google Photos will give users more control over Partner Sharing.
Follow @paul_monckton on Instagram.
