Everyone praises this Google Photos shortcut — but it didn't work for me

I previously criticized Google for not including scrollbars on YouTube and YouTube Music’s Playlists. It feels even more disappointing since Google Photos had it for years.

I need a scrollbar more in YouTube Music than I do in Google Photos. I love the Photos app, but I don’t use it as much as I listen to my playlists on YouTube Music.

This may sound like I am a big fan of Google Photos’ scrollbar (also known as a scrubber), but I am not. While many users consider it to be a convenient feature, it sometimes makes the scrolling more complicated.

I appreciate its convenience, but it hypes up way more than it delivers. It gave me false hope that it could do certain things it actually couldn’t.

Although most of the people I came across love Google Photos’ scrollbar, it didn’t work for me. I want it to be more precise and less misleading.

Here is why Google Photos’ scrollbar didn’t work for me.

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Posts By  Rahul Naskar

Google Photos’ scrollbar makes scrolling easy, but I want more

Having a large collection of something has a downside. The larger it gets, the harder it becomes to find older items.

Google Photos’ scrollbar tries to fix this problem. You can drag the scrollbar up and down to quickly move between two different timelines, which otherwise would have taken a long time.

It may not be that useful if you want to go several months back, but when you want to go several years back, it makes a difference.

I absolutely love that it saves time. However, it is nowhere near perfect. I appreciate its existence, but not the way it wants to help us with scrolling.

The scrollbar doesn’t appear right after you open the Google Photos app. It appears when you start scrolling.

The moment you start dragging the scrollbar, it displays the years, allowing you to navigate through photos from the past quickly.

It sounds great in theory, but when I get my hands on the scrollbar, it always jumps by several months rather than taking me exactly where I want to be.

I can’t remember a single instance when I got it completely right in one attempt. Every time the scrollbar gets it wrong, I scroll several months to get to the exact month.

This has happened to me so many times that it now feels more frustrating than something useful.

I don’t face the same problem in the Samsung Gallery app. It also has a timeline scrollbar like Google Photos.

Although not as prominent as the one in Google Photos in its presence, Samsung Gallery’s scrollbar always lands me exactly where I want to be.

Where does Google Photos’ timeline scrollbar go wrong?

There are at least a couple of issues with the current implementation of Google Photos’ timeline scrollbar.

The scrollbar appears on the right side of the display, and its shape means my thumb often covers it, making it hard to track when I drag it.

I have to observe my thumb movement instead of the scrollbar and lift it off the screen when I feel I have reached where I wanted to be. Still, I get it wrong every time.

The only way to mitigate this problem is by swiping the thumb to the left while dragging the scrollbar. This will give you a clearer view of where the scrollbar actually is.

But it shouldn’t be this complicated. Google can easily nullify the disadvantage of the tiny scrollbar by following how Samsung solved the problem.

Samsung Gallery’s timeline scrollbar shows you dates, months, and years as you scroll. When you drag the scrollbar, the date and the month are clearly visible on the left side of your thumb.

There is no way you’ll get it wrong with Samsung Gallery, because all you have to do is stop dragging with your thumb when you see the date you are looking for.

This is not the case with Google Photos. There are no useful intermediates, such as dates and months between the years, which makes the scrollbar act with less precision.

Speed is important, but Google Photos has to nail precision

My Google Photos shows all my clicks from the past eight years. So, this will require a lot of scrolling if I want to show my lackluster photography skills in 2018.

A scrollbar that can help me scroll through photos quickly is helpful in that sense. If not for accuracy, it helps get closer to the point I wanted to be.

But that’s not what I expect from Google Photos, an app that has over 10 billion downloads on the Google Play Store.

For an app this popular, speed must be accompanied by precision when I drag the scrollbar. I can’t fully embrace the feature until it offers both.