Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
Tom’s Guide
Tom’s Guide
Technology
Jeff Parsons

Google Photos will soon make clearing your pictures way easier — here’s how

A man staring at a phone with the Google Photos logo on it.

I don't know about you, but my Google Photos is a mess. Probably as a by-product of too much time spent with some of the best camera phones. Portraits, family snaps and work pictures are buried in among screenshots and too-many-to-count images, GIFs and memes imported automatically from the mass of group chats I inhabit.

Google seems to recognize that organising photos is a pain, because a new overflow menu in the Google Photos app is on the way to help things out. The catch is — for now — it'll only be available for Android users.

An update is rolling out that expands the menu to include a toggle option called "Show content from other apps." Disabling it will hide all the content that Google Photos saves from third-party apps like WhatsApp, Gmail, Slack or Facebook Messenger. I can't begin to tell you how useful this will be as a quick way of clearing out and banishing all the clutter I accumulate in my photo roll.

Get granular

If you want to go even deeper, if you enable third-party app sharing, you'll be able to tap a "Customize by app" option to, for example, enable media from Slack but hide it from WhatsApp.

The feature has been in development since at least last summer, but is finally rolling out with the latest version of Google Photos but, as mentioned, it's only available on Android right now.

Even when I'm using an iPhone, I tend to use Google Photos over Apple's alternative but have never had much use for the app's previous organizational tool, Photo Stacks. This option groups similar photos (taken within a short space of time) into piles that can be anything up to 100 photos. Tapping on the lead images reveals a grid or gallery at the bottom of the screen. It's a useful implementation but I'll be very happy to have the option to cut off the inflow of useless photos at the source.

All I can say is that hopefully the iOS implementation of this feature isn't far behind so iPhone users can also benefit.

More from Tom's Guide

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.