From notes to chat, Google Photos will make image management instant

Despite entering the exclusive club of apps with over ten billion downloads on the Play Store, a milestone that certifies a widespread diffusion far beyond the simple preinstallation on Android devices, Google Photos is not immune to criticism.

The application has established itself as the reference standard for backup and the memory management, offering a service that makes it difficult to find viable alternatives.

However, perfection is still distant and some shortcomings often force users to take cumbersome steps to perform seemingly trivial actions.

One of these, the management of image sharing, seems finally poised for an intelligent resolution.

Google Photos, Copy button for quick sharing coming soon

The technical analysis conducted by Android Authority on the version 7.63.0.867680147 of the application has revealed a hidden feature in the code: the introduction of a Copy button inside the share menu.

Until now, interacting with images on Google Photos followed a rigid path. Selecting a photo and pressing the Share button, the operating system opens the classic sheet that suggests contacts and apps.

This workflow is frustrating for those who simply want to insert an image into an open chat, perhaps as a direct reply to a specific message on platforms such as WhatsApp or Telegram.

Alternatively, the user is forced to exit Photos, open the messaging app, navigate to the in-chat gallery and select the downloaded file.

The introduction of the Copy button will allow inserting the image directly into the phone’s clipboard, enabling you to paste it instantly into any text field, greatly speeding up the interaction.

An aspect of great interest, still to be clarified, concerns the behavior of the feature with files not physically present on the device. If the new command allowed copying to the clipboard an image stored exclusively in the cloud without having to pre-download it manually, it would be a significant step forward in resource and data management.

The operating system would handle the temporary retrieval of the file, making the user experience fluent and free of delays.

The teardown of the APK also highlighted traces of the design language Material 3 Expressive, which should bring a breath of visual freshness to several sections of the app, including slight tweaks to the Albums and Updates screens.

Although there are no official confirmations on release timelines yet, the presence of these elements in the code suggests that the Mountain View giant is actively working to integrate these improvements in upcoming stable versions, addressing a practicality need that users have long raised.