- Android 13 added a new photo picker experience that lets you privately select photos or videos to share with an app.
- Since launch, Android’s photo picker was limited to selecting photos or videos stored locally on the device.
- Google Photos is preparing to integrate with the photo picker so you can share photos or videos stored in the cloud.
One of the key features of last year’s Android 13 release was the new system Photo Picker. The Photo Picker lets you choose exactly which media files to share with an app. In contrast, the custom media pickers that many apps use either get access to all or none of your photos and videos. It would be great if more developers adopted Android’s Photo Picker since it’s more private by design, but there’s a good reason that many haven’t: It’s still missing basic features like letting you select media files stored in the cloud. That could change soon, though, since we’re finally seeing signs that cloud content from apps like Google Photos will appear in Android’s Photo Picker.
If you’re not that familiar with Android’s Photo Picker, I don’t blame you, since there aren’t a lot of apps out there that utilize it right now. The Photo Picker is available natively on all devices running Android 11 and newer as it’s part of an updatable Project Mainline module, but it’s also available on devices running Android versions as far back as Android 4.4 thanks to a backported version provided by Google Play Services. Here’s what the Photo Picker currently looks like if you were to find an app that invokes it: