The use of Google Photos can differ significantly between the two large platforms desktop and smartphone because on the mobile device the gallery also includes the locally stored images and videos. In order to do justice to this, a new gallery view was recently announced, but it met with little opposition and has now been withdrawn. The presentation is to be revised again.
Google Photos is a strong platform, but on the smartphone, it has the problem that both the local media as well as the photos and videos from the cloud should be brought under one roof. This could be easily solved by the automatic backup, but at the latest with the end of the unlimited storage space (which is already wobbling again), this had been done. In order to do justice to the dual role, the new gallery tab was recently announced.
This tab still summarizes the media from both sources, but the update ensured that no distinction is made between the cloud album and the offline folder. A small icon would have been enough, but this was not intended. No wonder this did not go down well in the first reactions and they now want to revise the whole thing again. The rollout announced on the same day only reached very few users on Android and was mainly found on iOS. As of today, however, it has disappeared again for all users.
It can be assumed that a clearer separation between the media sources will be made. Either with the already mentioned icon or by an even stronger emphasis on the filters at the top. In the following two screenshots, you can see how this implementation was planned.
The withdrawal of the update is only postponed, but not canceled. You want to bring “additional changes” into the interface. In addition, this means that there will be no role backward, but only the expected optimizations. A timetable was not mentioned, but one must probably expect a delay of several weeks again.
By the way, the new share dialog is not affected by the stop, because as previously announced, it is to be rolled out for all users in the course of the next few weeks. For some, this has already been shown.