Google has started a wider roll-out of its much-needed Photo Stacks feature
More Google Photos users are starting to receive a much-needed app upgrade that can radically improve the experience of scrolling through larger photo libraries.
After an initial trial in November of last year, Google is finally rolling out its long-awaited Photo Stacks feature to a wider audience. The new feature announces itself via a colorful pop-up message, alerting users to the fact that photo stacks have been automatically enabled. There’s also a button provided to turn the feature off.
Photo stacks are automatically generated collections of photos taken around the same time and grouped under a single thumbnail image. Individual photos in a stack are hidden from the main photos view, save for one that is nominated as the “top pick” and serves as the thumbnail for the whole stack.
Enabling the feature can tidy up the photos view significantly, preventing the all-too-familiar experience of scrolling through multiple screens of similar images to find the one you want—a situation that will occur frequently if you’re the kind of person who makes several attempts at every selfie or group shot.
With photo stacks enabled, you will only see your favorite versions of each picture unless you tap on a photo stack to reveal the full collection of photos inside.
One possible issue with photo stacks is that, because only “top pick” images are shown by default, it may be harder to find a particular version of a photo if it has been tidied away into a photo stack. You won’t see it at all when casually scrolling through your photos. In this case, you’ll have to keep an eye out for a similar photo and then manually open the stack to look for your chosen picture. If this becomes annoying, you can turn off photo stacks entirely (see below).
Once inside a photo stack, you can change the photo chosen as the top pick and, optionally, delete all of the other photos in one go. You can also remove individual images from the stack manually if you don’t feel they belong. Photo stacks can also be converted into animations in a single tap.
To configure the Photo Stacks feature, open the Google Photos app and enter the settings menu. Select “Preferences” and look for “Stack similar photos.” You will find a toggle switch to enable or disable the feature here. For full instructions, refer to Google’s Photo Stacks support document.
Unfortunately, despite the wider roll-out, some users don’t yet have photo stacks available, so keep a look out for the pop-up message or check manually in case you missed it.
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