Google Photos showing large ‘Photo book store’ ad in app menu

Google Photos is one of Google’s best services, made especially useful by the fact that it’s mostly free. One of the paid parts of the Google Photos app is the ability to make photo books, and some users are now seeing large ads for those books in the app.

In the past year or so, Google has been pushing hard for more users to try out their photo books service. Just in December, they promoted a “Best of 2018” photo book, automatically generated from your year’s best photos, and they even tried giving photo books away to Google Fi subscribers.

We’re now seeing a sizable advertisement for photo books in the Google Photos app for Android when swiping in the side menu. This new advertisement takes the place of the standard “Photo books” section.

Google may not consider this to be an ad directly, as the section is now called the “Photo book store.” However, this new photo books section is now easily 3 times its previous size and prominently placed above the other menu items. So, it’s clear that Google is trying to get the attention of users with the graphic and size.

Tapping the “Photo book store” ad brings up the same photo selection page that Google Photos brought you to previously.

As with many other things Google does, this “Photo book store” ad may simply be an A/B test that may be reverted back later on. In our own testing, it seems to only be showing for Android users in the United States for now.