Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Photos’ Photo Stack feature automatically groups similar-looking photos, helping declutter your main Photos feed.
- In the future, the app could allow users to manually group photos into Stacks.
- This would give users more control over how their photos are organized in the Photos feed.
Google Photos is one of the best photo management apps for Android users, and it even has power user features that appeal to enthusiasts as well. For instance, features like Photo Stacking greatly assist in uncluttering your main Photos feed by clubbing similar images together. However, there is little control here, as users can only toggle the feature on and off. If the automatic grouping doesn’t work well enough, you’d still be left with a cluttered feed. Google could soon give some power back to users by letting them manually group photos into Photo Stacks.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Google Photos v7.12 includes code suggesting that Google could expand the photo stacking feature to allow users to manually create Stacks of similar photos.
Code
Stack Photos Currently, Google automatically creates Photo Stacks when you turn on the Stack similar photos option. The above-mentioned code suggests that we could soon get manual grouping, too. We couldn’t locate UI changes for this currently. However, we reckon users would be able to choose multiple photos from the main Photos view and get the option to stack photos through the bottom sheet that appears (which currently houses options like Share, Favorite, Trash, and others).
Manual grouping for Photos Stacks is currently not live within Google Photos. We’ll update you when we learn more about the feature and if and when it rolls out.