Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Photos is testing a new search feature that will allow users to search for content in shared albums without saving the photos.
- We’ve spotted a filter to include and exclude shared photos in the search results
- Currently, users have to save shared photos to their accounts before they can be searched.
Google Photos is great for photo editing and media management, but it’s also pretty good for sharing photos with others. There is one caveat, though: You cannot search for anything in the images that others share with you, at least from what we can gather. Users have suggested that you need to save shared photos to your account first to be able to search for them, which isn’t very apparent to most users. Google has been working to fix that by directly opening up the ability to search for photos from albums shared with you on Google Photos.
We’ve spotted the first round of code in Google Photos v7.31:
Code
<string name="photos_search_shared_unsaved_shared_content_info_banner_description">Search can show photos of people, pets, and more, including those that have been shared with you. Learn more</string>
<string name="photos_search_shared_unsaved_shared_content_info_banner_title">Search all of your photos</string>As the description states, Google Photos will soon be able to search for people, pets, and more in all your photos, including photos shared with you.
In Google Photos v7.39, Google added code for a filter that would let users include and exclude photos shared with them (just in case you have been spammed with images you don’t care about).
Code
<string name="photos_search_menu_filter_action_include_shared">Include shared with me</string>Curiously, there is no filter yet to search only in photos shared with you.
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With Google Photos v7.45, we managed to activate the info card mentioned in the above strings:
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
Unfortunately, the feature doesn’t yet work for us, which makes sense since it is still a work in progress. We’ll update you when it starts working or when we learn more about its functionality.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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