The Photos app saw a small bump to v1.10 yesterday (and a tiny bug fix today), but it seems most people will be hard pressed to find much in the way of changes. However, there seems to be one interesting feature popping up for a very small number of users. If the right circumstances are met, users will have an option to create a tiny floating shortcut to the Photos app over the screen of their camera apps. Yeah, it sounds pretty weird, but it would be useful for apps that don’t offer a shortcut of their own.
Thanks, Dominic Witte.
The shortcut to Photos will be displayed when when a camera app is open in the foreground. Along with the floating icon, there is a tiny thumbnail of the last picture that was taken. A similar feature appeared earlier this year in the Carousel app by Dropbox.
It’s not really clear how to get this option to appear. I’ve tried installing a handful of different popular camera apps on a few different phones to trigger it, but the option never shows up for me. Like so many of Google’s apps lately, this feature is probably rolling out to a very limited set of individual users. When it is available, a toggle should be present in the Settings screen and a card should appear in the Assistant screen.
In case you’re interested in seeing some of the text that isn’t shown by the screenshots above, here are the relevant strings:
strings
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_a11y_shortcut”Open in Google Photos/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_assistant_card_add_shortcut”ADD SHORTCUT/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_assistant_card_description”Add a shortcut from the Camera to Google Photos. You can change this anytime in Settings./string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_assistant_card_title”Jump from Camera to Google Photos/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_assistant_enabled_card_description”Take a photo with your Camera and the shortcut appears/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_assistant_enabled_card_settings”SETTINGS/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_assistant_enabled_card_take_a_photo”TAKE A PHOTO/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_assistant_enabled_card_title”Shortcut added/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_assistant_notification_content”Jump from Camera to Google Photos./string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_assistant_notification_title”Google Photos shortcut/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_connector_impl_err_no_camera_permission_summary”You need to allow Camera access/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_connector_impl_err_no_overlay_permission_summary”You need to turn on Permit drawing over other apps in Settings/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_connector_impl_err_no_permission_dialog_cancel”Cancel/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_connector_impl_err_no_permission_dialog_title”“Can’t turn camera shortcut on”/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_connector_impl_err_no_permission_dialog_try_again”TRY AGAIN/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_connector_impl_setting_summary”Add a shortcut on your Camera app that jumps to Google Photos/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_connector_impl_setting_title”Camera shortcut/string
string name=”photos_camerashortcut_connector_impl_turn_on_draw_over”Turn on “Permit drawing over other apps” to use Camera Shortcut/string
One more behavioral change has been reported. It seems that it’s now possible to delete photos saved to an SD card and other types of removable storage. This is probably going to come in pretty useful on lower-spec phones, particularly in the Android One family. – Thanks, Joey Riz.
Download
The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.
File Name: com.google.android.apps.photos_1.10.0.109224489-116284_minAPI14(armeabi-v7a)(nodpi).apk
Version: 1.10.0.109224489 (116284)