Google Photos Is Quietly Rethinking Backups And How You Interact With It
Contents
Sign in to your Android Police account
Summary
- Google Photos is getting a significant overhaul to its backup experience, providing much clearer and more transparent visual cues.
- New UI elements will show continuous backup status messages, helping you better understand the progress.
- However, there is no clarity over when these UI changes will be available for users.
The Google Photos app is undergoing a major design refresh, and it’s part of Google’s effort to integrate Android 16’s Material 3 Expressive across its apps, including Google Calendar and Files by Google, to ensure visual consistency. In addition to working towards implementing Material 3 Expressive across all its Android apps, it looks like the Mountain View tech giant is also interested in making Google Photos’ backup experience better.
Related
How to manually sync and back up Google Photos
Back up your photos manually by forcing the app to sync
As Android Authority’s APK teardown of Google Photos version 7.30 has shown, there are multiple ways Google is planning to improve backups in its photos app. However, none of them are action-oriented and are more about giving you visual cues for greater convenience and transparency about how backups work.
Here is how Google plans to overhaul the backup experience in Google Photos
As things stand right now, when backup is disabled, the Google Photos app tells users that backup is turned off, but the message appears for a very short time in the top left corner, right below the “Google Photos” typography.
Image source: Android Authority
The new UI the company is working on shows a Google Photos icon in the top left corner, and right beside it appears the message that tells you that the backup is turned off. And when the backup is complete, it will display a “Backup complete” message in the top left corner. Tapping on it will reveal how many photos it has backed up.
But what message does it show when the backup process is ongoing, you ask? Well, it’ll show you how many photos it is backing up, along with the time it’ll take to complete the process at the top of the app. Below it, we also see a message that recommends users keep the app open for faster backup.
Image source: Android Authority
We can also see a “Preparing backup” in the top left corner, clearly suggesting that the message will appear just before the backup starts. Currently, it shows only the number of photos and videos left to be backed up when you tap the profile icon in the right corner of the app. This isn’t the most convenient approach, especially when you have a large number of photos to back up, as it’ll keep you in the dark about how long it’ll take.
This problem will no longer exist when, or if, Google introduces these UI changes to the Google Photos app. Unfortunately, there is no clarity about when they’ll be available for users, considering Google has no plans to change its mind midway. In the meantime, if you don’t like Google’s current approach to how backups work in Google Photos, you should check out some of its best alternatives to back up your photos safely.
