Google Photos Will Soon Add A Search Feature You Didn’t Know You Needed

You can find your memories in Google Photos in seconds if you know the trick to using some of the app’s powerful search features. While the search tools in Google Photos are indeed lifesavers, especially if you have gazillions of photos stored on your device or on the cloud, Google seems to have higher ambitions when it comes to making the app’s search experience truly effortless.

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Part of Google’s plan is to rethink how it wants to position the search bar in the Google Photos app. And thanks to the Android Authority’s APK teardown of Google Photos v7.24.0.744869131, we now know how the company’s efforts have culminated in a new search bar that can potentially take the app’s search capability from easy to effortless.

Google Photos will soon bring the search experience closer to you

As things stand right now, if you’re holding your phone in your palm and using it with one hand, the thumb does all the hard work to reach the search bar at the top of the Google Photos app. This makes it difficult to tap the search bar, especially for those who have big phones like the Galaxy S25 Ultra. However, this hassle will soon become a thing of the past, as Google Photos’ new search bar appears at the bottom of your phone screen.

Unlike the case of many previous APK teardowns, folks over at Android Authority not only found the existence of the feature but also managed to activate it in Google Photos, giving us complete clarity about what the new search bar looks like. Not only that, but it also reveals that Google is planning to introduce the new search bar in a new location in the Google Photos app.

Source: Android Authority

The search bar is the same as the current one you have in Google Photos, except that the new one appears at the bottom, closer to your thumb. This means when you tap the search option at the bottom of the Google Photos app, the search bar appears just above it instead of at the top of the app. Unlike the current one, the new search bar also stays visible at the bottom of the search result screen, allowing you to start fresh in case you want to revisit another set of memories in the Google Photos app.

However, it’s worth noting that these UI changes are a work-in-progress, which means the final output might look a bit different from what you are seeing right now. We won’t be surprised if the final product looks something like where, instead of moving Google Photos’ search bar on everyone’s phone, Google sets a screen size to trigger the search bar to appear at the bottom of the Google Photos app.

It might also let users choose the position of the search bar in Google Photos. These features in Google Photos can’t transform your smartphone images, but they will certainly take the phone screen size out of the equation in deciding the app’s level of ease of access.