With new updates, Google Home and Google Photos are drastically improved. There are some logical and practical innovations. Google has once again put two Android apps on the list of those that will be improved or expanded with new updates. Google Home and Google Photos only hinted at various innovations before Google then made the updates public. Google Photos is getting a much bigger update, so let’s start with that.
Google Photos: New gallery, better share tab and more
Google Photos gets a new gallery. Here you have new filters at the top of the screen. In addition, scrolling all the way down reveals a few new menu items, including new import functions, for example. At the top right, you will also find the option to change the order of the albums in the gallery tab.
Google has also revised the share tab. In several individual areas, it should be made easier for you to find the right photos to share and to manage them. Google would like to roll out the innovations for the share tab in the coming days. Probably independent of the other announced innovations.
Last but not least, Google Photos uses a banner to inform you about new screenshots on the start page if you don’t save your screenshots automatically and therefore don’t actually mix them with camera photos. We also get “when viewing a screenshot, we get a carousel of contextual suggestions for copying text, cropping, searching with Google Lens, and more.”
Google Home: Better control for the smart home and new things for privacy
Finally, I almost want to say. Google Home as an app is adapted to smart home control, which has been part of the system since Android 11. You can then control devices such as lamps and speakers directly from the app start page with a swipe gesture. Each device has a slider that you can swipe left and right.
Almost at the same time there is a new place where you can make the privacy settings.
“This one-stop entry point for managing your privacy lets you review and adjust your privacy settings, home activity, and Assistant data settings right within the app.”
And later this month there will be another update for the feed. “The update automatically sorts your home’s recent and most important events into an updated, uncluttered layout.”
