Google’s photo platform Google Photos has enjoyed great popularity for many years and has become a quasi-standard for backing up photos, especially on Android. But Google has severely curtailed some advantages so that alternatives are also becoming interesting. If you want to stay with Google, you should take a look at the powerful gallery app Gallery Go, which is ahead of Google Photos in some respects.
Gallery apps are a dime a dozen in the Play Store and many smartphone manufacturers also bring their own apps that are preinstalled and set as the default. Google Photos is now used as a gallery app on many smartphones, which is possible without any problems but does not necessarily correspond to the basic concept of the app. The mix of locally and cloud-stored media creates a mess that’s sometimes tricky to figure out.
With Gallery Go, Google offers an alternative way and offers an app that places itself somewhere between the usual gallery apps and Google Photos: The app either sorts photos into folders or presents them in reverse chronological order in an endless stream – just like you would from Google Photos knows. At the same time, there is smart sorting according to categories, which is carried out independently without user intervention. So you can say that the app is simply a Google Photos cropped for the cloud connection.
But it doesn’t end with categorization, because the app also has the powerful search function of Google Photos and gives users the opportunity to search for objects, people, places and much more in the photos. Active face recognition is of course required to search for people, which can be activated via the settings.
So that the in-app can be used at an acceptable speed and does not annoy the user with long waiting times, the index of the automatic sorting and image recognition is always updated at night. This means that the photos need up to 24 hours until they can be found using the search function or appear in the automatically created albums. Of course, the smartphone must be switched on at night for this to work.
Anyone who appreciates these sorting functions on Google Photos will quickly enjoy Gallery Go and be able to use the app intuitively. In any case, it is designed for quick use and therefore does not have such a (partly) overloaded and partly unstructured interface as the new Google Photos. Because Gallery Go itself is hardly updated, nothing on the surface is likely to change anytime soon.
But not only the organization of the pictures has been borrowed from Google Photos, but also the options for editing the pictures: the usual editor is on board and offers well-known tools. In it, you will find options for cropping or rotating photos, for color adjustment and also for automatic correction – completely sufficient for a gallery app. The main thing about Gallery Go is that the app is slim – both in terms of the interface and the required storage space on the smartphone. The APK is pleasantly small at around 10 MB. It’s difficult to pack in many more editing options and extras.
In the video below you can see the most important features as well as the orientation and target group of Gallery Go in a quick summary. As you can see, the app has what it takes to become a standard tool, but is far from being as popular as its big brother. Theoretically, you only need one of the two apps, but if you want to separate local and cloud photos cleanly, you might want to use both apps in parallel – without losing a large range of functions.
It’s quite possible that one day Google will swap the place of Google Photos for Gallery Go or merge the two apps. Gallery Go must of course remain as a resource saver, but a widely supported offline mode in Google Photos would be very practical. After all, the strong synchronization is realized via the Play Services and not via the Google Photos apps.
The close proximity to Google Photos
The app seems to appeal to users, because it currently has a good 4.2 stars in the Play Store, but only on an installation basis of just over 100 million devices. For a Google app that is actually placed in the mainstream area, this is comparatively manageable.
It may be because it was only available regionally at the beginning and was only later opened up to all users and countries. Because the app didn’t really make it into the media after the first announcement in July 2019, that’s easy to explain.
Just take a look at the app. For me, it is an underestimated Google app, which is probably only developed very slowly or not at all due to the comparatively small user base. It would be a shame if the plug were pulled one day because it brings a lot with it that is not possible with Google Photos due to the cloud connection.