Joe Maring / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Photos appears to be testing a redesigned Collections tab with a cleaner layout.
- The new UI reorganizes each collection into a scrollable section.
- Those sections can also be collapsed, and the app remembers your preferred layout.
It seems like Google Photos is one of the apps that the company is never fully satisfied with — constantly tinkering to optimize the experience. For example, it was only in February that we spotted Google testing some changes related to how you move around the app. It now looks like the Collections tab could be next in line for a major revamp.
Right now, the Google Photos Collections tab is fairly busy. At the top, you’ve got shortcuts like Favorites and Trash, while the rest of the screen puts squares within squares as it orders things like Albums, Documents, and so on. It works well enough, but you don’t get much insight into what’s in each collection from the top-level view.
After digging into the app, we managed to activate a redesigned version of that page, and it looks like Google is testing a cleaner layout that makes the contents of each collection easier to preview. The new interface puts the four quick-access buttons in a row at the top. Under that, the rest of the Collections tab is split into clearer horizontal sections for each collection.
Each of those sections shows a horizontally scrollable row of previews, so you can browse a few items at a glance and then tap the arrow on the right to open the full section. Compared to the current design, it feels a bit more orderly and easier to scan.
A nice additional touch is that these sections can also be expanded and collapsed. So if you don’t really care about a particular collection, you can tuck it away and keep the page cleaner. Google Photos also appears to remember the state of each section, meaning collapsed sections stay collapsed the next time you open the tab.
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There’s no guarantee this redesign will roll out publicly, and it could still change before that happens. But this looks like the sort of refresh Google could plausibly ship, since it doesn’t really change what Collections does so much as make the whole tab feel less messy and easier to peruse.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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