Like the Google Photos app for Android, but don’t like the Google Plus social network? Tough. Right now the two apps are tied together. While the Photos app gets its own icon, it’s not a standalone app. It’s actually part of Google+.
But that could soon change. The folks at Android Police have obtained a pre-release build of a new Google Photos app which has many of the same features plus a few new ones.
It’s likely that Google could officially announce the new Google Photos app during the Google I/O conference starting May 28th. But here’s what we know so far:
- The app organizes your photos, lets you back up photos to the cloud, and makes your library searchable by things like people, animals, or other recognizable objects.
- You can pinch to zoom in a gallery to see more photos.
- There’s support for selecting multiple photos at once to share or delete.
- Google’s Autoawesome feature has been renamed “assistant” and in addition to automatically creating animations based on your photos you can choose when to create albums, movies, stories, or collages.
Some of these features may change by the time Google officially releases the new Photos app.
Android Police has more details, photos, and a more in-depth look at the new assistant feature.
This sounds like Picasa before they folded it into Google+.
Now bring back Picasa Web or an equivalent. It was great being able to take photos on my phone and later manipulate them from a computer. Nowhere in that process do I have a use for a second-rate Facebook clone.
Long overdue; a move in the right direction.
YouTube needs to be completely disconnected from G+ next. So annoyed that I cannot close my G+ account without shutting down my YouTube account!