Summary
There’s a reason most people don’t bother switching away from Google Photos. It has almost everything you could need, from a clean interface to AI-powered search and editing tools. But as someone who uses it every day, rigorously, alongside other third-party gallery apps, I’ve noticed some basic features that are still missing. These aren’t nitpicky asks for niche features either. They’re all basic things, the kind you’d expect Google Photos to have figured out years ago. Ability to search locally saved photos If it’s not in the cloud, it’s invisible Google Photos’ main highlight has always been its search feature. You can search for almost any photo with a keyword, location, or even a person’s name. The new Ask Photos feature is even better, since it’s powered by Gemini. You can ask it something specific, like which outfits you wore on your trip to Vietnam, and it’ll pull up all the relevant photos in seconds. But the big catch with Google Photos’ search is that it only works for photos that are backed up. If something is saved locally, Google Photos won’t show it in the search results at all. This is a huge letdown because, like most people, I don’t back up every album on my phone. Some photos remain local on purpose, but I still need to search for them from time to time. Samsung Gallery doesn’t have this limitation. You can search for any photo, and it pulls up results from both backed up and local items. Album locks One locked folder isn’t a solution This one genuinely baffles me. Being able to lock albums is such a basic thing, yet Google Photos doesn’t let you do it. Sure, there’s the Locked Folder feature, but it’s not the same thing. The biggest limitation is that you have to manually move every photo and video you want to hide into the Locked Folder, one by one. Most other Gallery apps make this so much easier. You can lock a specific album, such as Snapchat or WhatsApp Photos, and anything that lands in it is locked automatically. And you’re not limited to one album either. You can lock as many as you want to keep different kinds of content separate instead of dumping everything into a single folder. So yes, Locked Folder is useful, but I’d really love to see album locks in Google Photos. Batch editing is still missing Still no copy-paste for edits Google Photos is big on photo editing features. And yes, it has almost everything you need, including AI-powered tools for erasing objects, moving subjects, and fixing photo blur. The one thing I’ve always missed, though, is the ability to edit photos in bulk. Sure, it’s not something I need all the time, but the option to copy-paste is a standard for almost every Gallery app at this point. And it’s a huge time saver when you’ve taken twenty photos on a trip and want to apply the same tweak across all of them. Google Photos can’t do that, so the only option is to use a third-party app like Image Toolbox. A proper timeline video editor I don’t want to use CapCut It’s not just the photo editor that needs improvement. Google Photos’ video editor could also use an upgrade. Right now, it lets you trim video, apply effects, add music, and do some basic editing. There’s no proper timeline where you can see multiple clips laid out, split a clip to cut out the unwanted parts, and add new ones in to build a video. So, if I want to take five short clips from a weekend trip and turn them into one video, there’s just no native way to do that in Google Photos. This is something that still requires a third-party app like CapCut or Instagram’s Edits. For anyone who shoots a lot of videos on their phone and just wants to put together an Instagram Reel or a YouTube Short, the gap is real. Easy way to clean up duplicates and blurry photos Help me clear the junk This is another basic feature that’s been missing for years. Google Photos doesn’t really help you clean up storage. More specifically, it doesn’t give you an easy option to clean out duplicate photos or blurry shots. It has all the AI power needed to spot these. It’d be great if Google Photos gave an easy option to flag and delete these in one go. That’d give you one more way to free up storage space on an Android phone. Right now, there’s only the “Clean up space” option that lets you find large photos, unsupported videos, and other clutter. But again, it only works for photos that are backed up and not stored locally on your phone. If Google Photos could do the same for local photos too, it’d be even better.