Android’s Photo Picker Is Finally Getting Search

Android’s Photo Picker has enabled Android smartphone owners to easily share photos across apps and social media platforms for years, but it will soon introduce a much-requested search function, allowing users to find specific images much faster.

Android Authority reports that Photo Picker is slated to receive a significant upgrade, although some users have already reported seeing the new search function inside Photo Picker on their Android devices, particularly Pixel phones running Android 16.

Photo Picker works within a wide range of Android apps, allowing users to select specific images to share, rather than providing an app with full access to every photo on a user’s device. It’s great from a privacy standpoint to not have complete photo access, but it can mean users have to endlessly scroll through many images to find a specific one.

As Android’s Developers website explains, “As shown in the privacy best practices codelab, the photo picker provides a safe, built-in way for users to grant your app access to only selected images and videos, instead of their entire media library.”

While more privacy is good, Photo Picker has some glaring issues, including a lack of even basic search functionality. The new search feature aims to change that, allowing users to locate specific photos with search terms, much like users can already do in Google Photos. Android users can search for photos of particular people, subjects, or places using keywords.

Sometimes, someone knows the exact time frame when they captured the desired photo, so a date scrubber is also reportedly coming to Photo Picker, allowing users to dial in a specific time frame to browse within the image selection tool.

While this may not be a groundbreaking feature, it will significantly improve the image-sharing experiences for the billions of people who use Android smartphones. While iOS receives a lot of attention thanks to the iPhone’s popularity, Android remains the most widely used mobile operating system by far, with an over 70-percent market share.

Photo Picker improvements have been a long time coming, especially as Google has become increasingly strict about third-party apps using Photo Picker instead of requiring broader access to users’ photo and video libraries. Photo libraries should be private, but that doesn’t mean that they need to be a pain to navigate inside people’s favorite smartphone apps.

Image credits: Google. Header image created using an asset licensed via Depositphotos.