Google Photos app gets refresh look, new features

David Lieb flipped his phone around for a demo of the redesigned Google Photos app he oversaw and almost instantly, a video of his dog was activated.

It showed Rowan, a golden retriever and Irish setter mix, leaping into a pond in Lake Tahoe, California — the same video that played not just for USA TODAY, but during a demo for Google employees.

"Ten or 12 Googlers were pinging me,’’ said Lieb, the product lead for Google Photos, "and just saying, 'Oh, your dog is so cool.'"

The redesigned Google Photos app is nifty, too.

Five years after the original app was launched, Lieb is touting the refreshed version as a way to help people reminisce as much as store and manage photos.

A quick rundown on what’s new:

— The app is cleaner and simpler to use, reflected, in part, by the reduced number of tabs at the bottom of the screen, from four to three: photos, search and library.

“‘What we found is when users were looking for a specific thing, sometimes all of the stuff in the product kind of got in the way and it was hard for them to find,’’ Lieb said. “So compare that now to this version, it’s just a whole lot simpler. That was the first goal of the design.’’

Then there are the bells and whistles:

— A main photo grid, on which featured photos are enlarged and videos automatically activate (i.e.,, Rowan leaping into the water. “I take a lot of pictures of my dog,’’ Lieb said.)

— A new search tab, which allows users to type in any query, without labeling photos, and get the requested photos thanks to Google’s AI capability.

— A map view, which allows users to find photos based on the geographic location where the photos were taken.

During a video chat with USA TODAY, Lieb scrolled over Africa on a map, and photos suddenly appeared that he said were of him and his wife during their honeymoon in Rwanda. He scrolled on the map, and up popped photos of mountain gorillas in Rwanda.

“During COVID, you know, when we’re all kind of locked down and not able to spend as much time with family and friends, this has become really an invaluable experience for us, just to remember those good times,’’ he said.

As he spoke, a “memories’’ feature on the app led Lieb to a photo of his wife cutting his hair during the pandemic.

“Which was quite an adventure,’’ he said with a smile.

That photo is one of more than 100,000 Lieb has said he has taken and stored on Google Photos.

“I don’t know what the right word is, 'daunting,' 'scary,' 'interesting,' to think now that photography is so accessible to people. Ten years from now, 20 years from now, what’s that number going to be for people?’’ he said. “It probably will be in the millions" of photos, he said. All the more reason to build tools to manage, make sense and "actually get real value out of it," he said.

“Otherwise, it’s just going to be this digital kind of wasteland of stuff you don’t ever have time to look at.’’

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Google Photos gets new search, map view, cleaner interface