Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Photos could soon get a new setting to toggle the visibility of backed-up photos from other apps, letting you control whether these images show up in your primary Photos feed.
- The feature also includes a custom setting to let you toggle the visibility on a per-app basis. Images from other apps will bear the tag of the app.
- This feature is currently not live in Google Photos, and could be rolled out in the future.
Google Photos has several neat features that make it one of the best photo storage apps around where you can upload all your photos. Many people also use it as their primary photo management app (aka the default Gallery app), but there’s room for improvement here. And then there are people who use Google Photos as both, for storage and for viewing all their photos. If you fall in the second category, then there’s an important new feature that is coming soon to Google Photos that will let you back up photos from other apps while still keeping your primary Photos feed clean of unnecessary clutter.
To understand the change, one must understand the current behavior. Google Photos’ primary Photos view displays all your photos present and backed up in the DCIM folder. If you want to view photos that are present outside of the DCIM folder, i.e., media generated by other apps, then you can view those at Library > Photos on device, arranged by the respective device folders.
If you want to back up any of these folders, you can manually turn on the backup, with the caveat that these photos and images will now also show up in the primary Photos view. So if you turn on backup for the WhatsApp or Office Lens folders, for example, the images (including GIFs, user-generated stickers, scanned documents etc) present will show up alongside your camera photos in the DCIM folder.
Android Authority contributor Assemble Debug spotted an upcoming feature in Google Photos v6.813.
In the future, Photos settings will have a dedicated “Photos view” section, which will house settings for photo stacking, photos from other apps, and layout. The Photos from other apps section is new, and as the name implies, you will soon be able to customize whether backed-up images from other apps show up in your primary Photos feed.
Photos from other apps will give you four options: Show all, Hide clutter, Show none, and Custom. Show all will show all backed-up images in your primary Photos view. Hide clutter will hide lower-priority content like GIFs and memes from the Photos view. Show none will show no backed-up images from other apps (while those images continue to be backed up).
The Custom option lets you individually set the preference for specific third-party apps. This setting is available for WhatsApp for now, but it’s fair to presume that support for other apps will be available in the future.
The benefit of these changes is that you can back up media from other apps while still retaining visibility control for your primary Photos view. All backed-up content remains searchable within Photos, so there are other ways to access the images.
Backed-up images from other apps will bear the relevant tag, so you can view those details on secondary devices and hide those photos there, too. We presume that a similar setting will be available on Google Photos on the web too.
This new feature is not currently live within the app. Google is currently testing it within the app, so it may roll out in the future. It’s not clear if and when this will roll out, but considering its utility in keeping your Photos view organized, we hope to see it roll out soon.
