Google makes it easier to find the right photo on Android

When you need to share a photo or video, Android Photo Picker lets you do so without giving an app access to your entire media gallery. It uses a simple two-tab user interface to help you selectively share media: the main “Photos” tab shows your images in reverse chronological order, while the “Collections” tab shows any albums you’ve created. However, finding the right image can be difficult if it is not part of a collection. Fortunately, Google is introducing new features to make it easier.

With the release of Android 16 QPR2 Beta 3 today, Google updated the Photo Picker with two new features. First, it now has a date cleaner that lets you quickly browse your photo collection, similar to the one in Google Photos. When you scroll through the Photos tab, a handle appears that you can drag to jump to a specific month.

This is a huge time saver, especially if you have a large collection of photographs. Instead of endlessly scrolling through your gallery, you can simply drag the handle to find what you’re looking for. This works best, of course, if you know what month the photo was taken, although scrolling can help jog your memory.

The second, smaller change is to the search tool that launched last month. Previously, you could only search your gallery with a text query, but Android 16 QPR2 Beta 3 adds a microphone button to the search box. Tapping it opens a voice input dialog that lets you perform a voice search on your photo collection, a handy option for when your hands are full.

Although these Photo Picker improvements are currently only available in Android 16 QPR2 Beta 3, they will come to older versions of Android in a future Google Play system update. We don’t know exactly when that will happen, but we’ll be sure to let you know when the update is released. For a breakdown of other changes in Android 16 QPR2 Beta 3, check out this article.