I'm tired of pretending Google Photos is a good Android gallery app

11 Jun 2026, 11:00 by Parth Shah · Android Police

Google Photos is the default Android gallery, so we treat it like one. But let’s be honest with ourselves, as an actual, local media viewer, it’s miserable.

It started as a brilliant tool for cloud backups, but quickly turned into an aggressive puzzle that forgets why we open a gallery app in the first place.

It’s a phenomenal cloud storage service, but it’s time to stop pretending it’s a good Android gallery app.

I found a Gemini feature so good, I deleted a bunch of apps

Get ready for a cleaner home screen

Posts 32
By Ben Khalesi

The cloud-first, local never philosophy

At its core, Google Photos suffers from an identity crisis. It doesn’t actually want to be a local gallery app; it wants to be a cloud portal.

As a tech reviewer, I take dozens of screenshots every single day (capturing app interfaces, benchmarking scores, weird software bugs, and battery stats).

For obvious reasons, I don’t want these temporary workspace files syncing to my permanent cloud archive and eating up my paid storage quota.

I need them locally, right now, so I can review and drop relevant ones to my Mac and delete them later.

When I open the app, the main ‘Photos’ tab ignores them because they aren’t marked for cloud backup.

Instead, I’m forced to tap over to the Collections tab, scroll past a bunch of cloud-specific folders, and tap On this device to find the Screenshots folder.

It is a multistep chore for a task that should take a single tap. In almost any other dedicated Android gallery app, your latest media is treated equally, regardless of where it came from.

You open the app, and your most recent images, like a camera shot, a downloaded asset, or a screenshot, are sitting right there at the top of the main feed.

Now, there is a way to turn off this behavior, but the option is buried in the Settings menu, and it leaves an ugly cloud icon with a cross mark under those local files that haven’t been uploaded to the servers.

You can even try using Google Photos in a dead zone or on a flight. Thumbnails can be blurry, and the app feels sluggish because it’s constantly trying to talk to a server instead of reading local storage.

Features nobody asked for

Somewhere along the line, Google decided that a gallery app shouldn’t just be a passive viewer. It needed to be a social network, an AI search engine (more on that in a minute), a creation suite, and a print shop all at once.

The top of my main feed is constantly hijacked by Memories that show what I was doing three years ago today, or worse, awkward collages of random faces I would rather not revisit.

Also, Google Photos is obsessed with its Sharing features. It constantly tries to force a chat-and-collaboration ecosystem into a space where it doesn’t belong.

This endless bloat has a real performance cost. Because the app is constantly trying to index face groupings, organize cloud-based memories, and load material from a server, it feels heavy.

A real gallery app should prioritize speed and offline immediacy. When I tap the app icon, the layout should render instantly. I shouldn’t have to wait for a network ping, a spinning loading wheel, or a cloud sync.

It should also treat my latest local media with equal importance and shouldn’t constantly ping me to upload them to Google Cloud.

How to access Google Photos on any device

View and download your photos from anywhere

Posts 4
By Anu Joy

Gemini integration has been a major miss

When Google first introduced Gemini in Photos, I was pumped. But it’s been a major miss.

The natural language parsing is impressive at first glance. If I type, ‘Get me the top three shots from Ba Na Hills,’ the app does a great job of digging through my travel history.

But that is exactly where the magic ends. I can’t take further action on them within an app. It’s just a dead-end image viewer.

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If I want to actually do something with those photos, I am forced to ditch Google Photos, jump to the standalone Gemini app, and use its extensions to pull the data from scratch.

Only there can I run a truly productive, multi-action prompt like: ‘Get me the top three shots from Ba Na Hills and give me a caption for my Instagram post.’

Or better yet, ‘Get me the top three shots from Ba Na Hills and send them to Parth on WhatsApp.’

The Gemini integration inside Google Photos is currently reduced to little more than a glorified, conversational search filter.

Time to break up with Google Photos

Overall, Google Photos is suffering from an identity crisis that users are paying the price for. It wants to be an AI search engine, a cloud backup vault, a photo editor, and a subscription storefront all at once.

And in trying to be everything, it has failed at being a simple gallery.

If you just want to open an app, find a screenshot from ten minutes ago without waiting for a cloud sync, and get on with your day, do yourself a favor and download a dedicated local gallery app.