As the likes of Apple and Dropbox have demonstrated, finding the magic formula for an all-encompassing photo service isn't easy. Google is having another crack at it this week, and screenshots of the upcoming app have spilled out onto the web via Android Police.
A lot of the functionality mirrors what's in the current Photos app (stuck inside Google+) but there are some new features: you can share photos and videos with a single URL, for example.
The Auto-Awesome tool is renamed as Assistant and gives you more manual control over the slideshows, movies and collages you can create from your content. Albums can be automatically generated based on date, location and other bits of metadata.
Features galore
As you would expect, Material Design principles are plastered everywhere, and based on these screenshots the app has a clean and straightforward layout that fits in with Google's other mobile apps. A new dedicated home on the web will be introduced too.
It looks like the emphasis is on automation. Your pictures will be tagged automatically, for example, so you can quickly pull up photos of the cat or a camping trip without having to label them all yourself. The integrated editing tools will get some spit and polish too.
We shouldn't have long to wait before all this becomes official: we're expecting Google to unveil its newly improved Photos app at some point during Google I/O, which starts later this week.
