Google Photos is one of the best library apps for yourfavorite Android phone. The service may not be fully free anymore, but it still gives you a convenient way to store, find, share, and edit your photos, with increasingly more powerful tools. This complexity that was added slowly but surely is also reflected in Photos’ settings, which is pretty cluttered and hard to dive into at a glance. Google seems to have recognized this and is rolling out a much more organized look.
The new settings page is only showing up for a few people on version 6.39 of the app, asspotted by Telegram user Cătălinand confirmed by Android expert Mishaal Rahman. It looks polished and ready to be shipped to more people. Instead of a long scrollable list of very specific options and some descriptions and sections sprinkled in, the new design only has six top-level destinations where you’re able to find the rest of the settings: Backup, Notifications, Preferences, Sharing, Apps & devices, and Privacy.
Before and after
While it may take a few more taps to find the right option, it’s arguably much cleaner and easier to navigate this way, although some of the options aren’t placed in the most intuitive places. For example, sharing options live both in the Privacy and the Sharing section, with the latter more concerned about partner sharing and skipped suggestions and the former presumably with link sharing. This could indicate that this redesign is still under development.
The one thing lacking from both the old and new version is a search option, though, which could speed up the process of finding the right setting even faster — especially if the options remain ordered the way they are right now.
At the same time, Photos has started to show just how much storage you save when you delete images for some people, both on the web and in the app. This is a nice touch that makes clear how impactful your decisions to delete multiple shots of the same scenes and subjects can be.
