Bringing photos from Google Photos Library into Android apps may soon become easier, as new changes to the system’s photo picker integrate with cloud storage apps.
With Android 13, Google started pushing a new system-wide photo picker that allows apps to import photos without your permission to actually view your photo library. Rather, Android displays a dedicated UI that allows you to view the photos stored on your device and pass just that single photo to the app. Although this new method is not universally used, a significant number of apps have adopted it.
But clearly, there are obvious gaps in functionality.
We store many of our photos and videos locally, but many of us also use cloud storage solutions like Google Photos. Apparently, that’s why Google is preparing some updates.
as discovered by Android permissionsadds support for “cloud media apps” to the Android Photo Picker, allowing users to specify apps on their device to display their libraries in the Photo Picker. This will obviously support Google Photos, but it looks like it may eventually support other apps as well.
Google previously said this was coming, but the feature is not yet available.
It’s unclear when this will be rolled out, but manually turning on Google Photos support in the Android Photo Picker seems to work fine on Android 14. So it looks like this will be published sooner rather than later.
Image credit: Android Authority
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