Google Photos

Google Photos improved share menu now rolling out

Damien Wilde | Sep 21 2020 - 4:20 am PT

Google Photos has long been one of the holdouts for the updated and arguably more intuitive share sheet redesign of recent Android upgrades. Thankfully, a slight refresh to the Google Photos share menu has arrived that removes the need to endlessly scroll before sharing to the app you want.

The rollout has been going on for a few days at least now but it looks like it should be available to more or less everyone by now (via Android Police). For those wondering what the heck we are talking about, the process of sharing from within Google Photos to another app — such as Google Messages or WhatsApp — has been a bit of an annoying process for quite a while.

Tapping the “share” icon would bring up a unique Google Photos share menu that would not expand any further than around a third of your screen. To select an external app to share to, you would have to scroll horizontally to find the app you wanted before tapping again to share your selected image or video. This is in no way fun or intuitive to use, and we don’t know why the vertical share sheet design just wasn’t implemented in all honesty.

However, this updated Google Photos share menu now includes a “More” option alongside a “Create link” button and the last couple of apps you’ve used. Tapping this will fire up the system-wide Android share menu which is complete with vertical scrolling, pinned apps, plus more.

The option is now showing up on almost all of our test devices and review units as of the past 48 hours, as it was initially only available in a limited capacity. Commenters over on Reddit suggest that it has been rolling out quietly over the past few days, so if you were avoiding using the in-built share menu within Google Photos, now you might have reason to start using it again.