If you’ve owned an Android phone at some point over the past few years, it’s impossible not to have come across Google Photos. It’s the default gallery app on Pixel phones and has a wide range of editing tools built-in to make it a complete package for anyone, regardless of their experience level with photography. This handy gallery app is now working on a visual refresh for many of its UI elements, which also involves the removal of the bottom navigation bar.
The ever-reliable Google News Telegram channel published some screenshots of this feature. It is supposedly rolling out to a small batch of Photos users, so don’t be surprised if you can’t find this on your app just yet. It’s hard not to notice the disappearance of the bottom navigation bar in these screenshots. The new version relies on a floating bar instead, with options for Photos, Memories, and Library, while the current Search tab gets a separate circular floating button to the right.
The Sharing option, which sits on the bottom bar in the current iteration of Photos, has been relocated to the top right of the screen, to the left of the profile image. Meanwhile, there’s an all-new Memories tab with a new UI, reminiscent of a redesign spotted by the same source back in early May. We can also notice that the Google Photos logo is now positioned to the top left rather than the center of the screen.
A bulk of these design changes are inconsistent with Google’s own apps, which makes us skeptical of ever seeing this on the stable version of Google Photos. The scope of this new interface’s rollout is limited to a “narrow range” of Android and iPhone owners, per Nail Sadykov, the person behind the Google News Telegram group. This suggests that Google is merely testing the waters with this radical new design and doesn’t really expect to go all in with it.
Whether you like these design changes or not depends on your personal taste. While some might prefer a bit of a change in UI elements from time to time, some (me included) prefer consistency in UI across all of Google’s apps. Though not all features are perfect, it’s safe to say that Google Photos is the easiest solution to store your photos and videos in the Android ecosystem, even if some of these UI changes can potentially be hit-and-miss.
