Chrome showing Google Photos memories right in the New Tab Page

Abner Li | Jul 30 2022 - 1:21 pm PT

As of late, Google has been working to add more features to Chrome’s New Tab Page, and the latest example is Google Photos integration.

Underneath the Google logo, search field, a 4×2 grid of page favicons, some users are seeing a “From your Google Photos” promo card:

See memories of your favorite people and more
Start exploring your memories from Google Photos, whenever you’re signed in.

“See memories” will turn on this integration and show three memories. Like at the top of Google Photos, these rotate and differ by user. I’m seeing “Similar shots” and memories from several years ago.

A tap opens Google Photos to the fullscreen memory viewer, while the New Tab Page card updates to show a different one.

The overflow menu in the top-right corner lets you quickly remove this card and visit settings. Open “Customize this page” and visit the “Cards” section. There’s also Background, Shortcuts, and Color and theme. It presumably swaps position with the unified shopping item as relevant.

We’re seeing this Google Photos integration on the latest ChromeOS beta (version 104), but it’s not widely rolled out in the stable channel of the Chrome browser. The following flag will let you enable it ahead of time:

chrome://flags/#ntp-photos-module

9to5Google’s Take

If Google wants to make NTP a better landing page (remember iGoogle?), a visual redesign to reduce scrolling would be beneficial. As is, the company logo takes too much space, while the search field continues to feel pointless given the Omnibox (address bar). Everything should fit in one screen and be highly glanceable. It’s also surprising that Google Discover has never appeared on the desktop web.