Key Takeaways
- Google is testing a vertical scrolling video feed that mimics popular social media like TikTok or YouTube Shorts.
- Unlike public social media, the new feed is populated entirely by your own private memories.
- The leaked feature is currently unfinished and lacks polish.
Google Photos looks set to make an unexpected pivot: it wants to become your next doomscrolling obsession. A new report from Android Authority reveals that Google is working on an AI-powered, vertically scrolling video feed.
While you might recoil at the idea of turning your private library into TikTok, the key difference here is that the feed will be built entirely from your own content and memories, stripping away the performative elements and competitive toxicity of public social media.
Spotted lying dormant in the latest version (7.60) of the Google Photos Android app, a new “Related” button appears whenever you watch a video. Tapping this button takes you to a feed of related videos that you can scroll through vertically, similar to TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts.
The new feature marks a distinct departure from the familiar Memories feature. While Memories appear automatically at the top of your grid, this feature needs to be activated manually: you tap the button whenever you want to see more content related to the video you have just watched.
This results in a feature more like a personal YouTube Shorts feed, curated by AI and featuring only your own content.
Once in the related video feed, you can tap to share the current video, mark it as a favorite or open up a details panel for more info. You can also jump to a “View day” panel to see all images from the day the video was taken.
Google Photos TikTok-style Feed: A Rough Draft Of The Future
The feature, in its current state, is a proof of concept that is still a long way from being ready to roll out to end users. It still shows many rough edges and fails to adhere to Google’s own Material Design 3 guidelines, so we should keep this in mind when evaluating it.
As shown in the example video, there’s a distinct lack of Google’s signature “expressive motion” effects. Crucially, it fails to meet the Material Design principle to “Guide attention with typography” by dumping users into a stream of videos without titles, headers, dates or any other context. Differing aspect ratios are currently handled poorly by simply padding videos with black bars.
Furthermore, as it stands, the feature doesn’t appear to remix, re-edit, or otherwise enhance your videos before displaying them. It’s just a simple feed of your content, as shot.
While this is arguably still a useful way to peruse your library, I suspect Google still has several tricks up its sleeve that will turn this engineering prototype into a popular, useful new feature. Existing features like “Key Moments” and “Highlight videos” can automatically identify and clip the most interesting parts of longer videos into the short moments people expect from a vertical video feed. Google could deploy this technology to transform the feed from a raw video browser into a stream of snackable, auto-edited shorts.
However, as it stands, the “Related” button appears to be simply a way of navigating your library based on the context of what you’re currently watching. It doesn’t create anything new.
A New Way To Watch Video On Google Photos
Google’s experiment with a TikTok-style feed marks a radical departure from its current grid format, acknowledging that today’s users have overwhelmingly shifted to vertical scrolling.
The “Related” button currently links to an unfinished feature. The grid is far from dead, but this is the first indicator of a new direction for the Google Photos app that could fundamentally change how we use it.
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