- Google is rolling out an updated Photo Picker with a much-needed search bar, making it easier to find specific photos and videos to share with apps.
- The new search functionality works for local media and integrates with Google Photos to search your cloud library and offer suggestions for people or places.
- The “Albums” tab is also being renamed to “Collections” and now groups folders to better organize your media and separate personal albums from app-generated ones.
Android’s Photo Picker allows you to selectively share photos and videos with an app, rather than granting it access to your entire media gallery. It’s a privacy-preserving tool intended for apps that only have a one-time or infrequent need for your media. While its simple two-tab UI — one for a chronological view of your media and another for your albums — is straightforward, it’s also arguably too simple, lacking many of the convenient features of Android’s older file picker. Fortunately, Google is now rolling out an update to the Photo Picker that introduces some much-needed quality-of-life improvements.
Late last week, Google began pushing the August 2025 Google Play System Update. While the official changelog was sparse, we’ve observed that the update activates a major new feature in Android’s Photo Picker: a search bar.