Skip to main content

Redesign makes Google Photos easier to navigate on Android

Finding an image on Google Photos just got a tad easier. In an Android-only update Thursday, Feb. 2, Google reworked the albums feature, adding enhanced organization to the ways albums are displayed.

The albums tab is now divided into three parts. Along with sorting your actual albums, the app now separates images based on what app you shot them with. A third category auto-organizes photos by location and what’s inside them. While the auto albums isn’t a new feature, the new organization makes them easier to find.

Recommended Videos

Along with the three new sections, the photos inside the albums are easier to search through. That’s because Google switched up the large cover photo at the top to take up half as much room. That small design switch allows users to see more albums on the screen at one time, speeding up the process of finding a specific one.

Version 2.8 of Google Photos is the app’s first significant update of the year. While this is a relatively small design change, the move aims to make navigating through albums faster. In the older version, navigating through the albums required going into the menu, but now the new tab and three sections cuts out a step.

The update is a design enhancement, not a feature addition for the popular app. Google Photos has between half a billion and a billion installs on Android alone, largely because the platform offers free unlimited storage to backup those photos, along with features for organizing and auto-tagging the images. The app also creates collages, animations and movies from photos.

On the iOS app, Google Photos moved to version 2.8 on January 25 with a few performance enhancements. The latest iPhone version also allows users to choose whether to use the original audio or remove music from videos as well.

Hillary K. Grigonis
Hillary never planned on becoming a photographer—and then she was handed a camera at her first writing job and she's been…
Google is putting Gemini on your wrist and more screens around you
Google Gemin on a smartwatch.

Google has just announced that the Gemini AI stack is coming to your Wear OS smartwatch, and a bunch of other screens in your life, such as your car’s infotainment dashboard and smart TV. With the move, the company is bringing down the curtain on Google Assistant across its device ecosystem. 

Gemini is already a part of the core Android experience, deeply integrated across the Workspace ecosystem of apps and even third-party platforms such as WhatsApp and Spotify. With Gemini making its way to Wear OS, Android Auto, and TV, users will have a more seamless experience and a wider variety of screens to get work done.

Read more
Google’s latest Android tools will protect you from a wider range of scams
Scam alert on Android phones.

Over the past few years, Google has released a host of safeguards for calls, messages, and web browsing that increasingly use AI to protect smartphone users from scams. Ahead of the I/O 2025 developers conference, Google has now detailed the next wave of safety features coming to Android devices this year. 

Bad actors often trick users into disabling the built-in safeguards, such as Google Play Protect, sideloading malware apps, and enabling permissions that allow data theft. Google says the next-gen safety features in Android will aim to negate these attacks. 

Read more
From Android 1.0 to Android 16: How Google’s mobile OS has evolved since 2008
Android 16 logo on Google Pixel 6a kept on the edge of a table.

Google I/O 2025 will be livestreaming next week, and software developers from Google are expected to unveil Android 16, which is slated to come out before the summer. The upcoming Android software update is expected to bring a host of new features as well as some returning mechanics from a decade ago.

To hold our excitement for the upcoming conference over, we're going to take a stroll down memory lane with a complete history of Android, from its humble beginnings as a T-Mobile-exclusive mobile tech to an AI-advanced software to grace contemporary smartphones like Google Pixel 9 and Samsung Galaxy S25. Android has come a long way since 2008, and it has a long way to go to be the best mobile software for everyone. That being said, here's a full timeline of Android's evolution.

Read more