Google Photos prepares new search filters to help you sift through your vast library (APK teardown)

Hadlee Simons / Android Authority

Google Photos could soon get new search filters to help you quickly sift through your library for the most recent photos related to a search keyword or ones that closely match the keyword. These filters will likely arrive with a future update, but we’ve managed to enable them ahead of the rollout to give you an early look.

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.

New strings of code spotted in Google Photos version 6.94 point toward two upcoming search filters: Most recent and Best match. As its name suggests, the Most recent filter will sort the search results chronologically, with the most recent photos appearing at the top.

The Best match filter, on the other hand, will bring up photos that closely match the search keyword. As you can see in the attached screenshots, searching for “flower” in Google Photos currently brings up several inaccurate results that don’t have any flowers in the frame. With the Best match filter enabled, the app stops showing such results and only brings up photos with a flower in the frame.

These filters aren’t the only way Google plans to improve search in the Photos app. The company is also working on adding the ability to display scrollable albums in search results, as shown in the screenshots below.

As mentioned earlier, the filters and albums in search results are not live in the current Google Photos release and could arrive with a future update. We’ll let you know when these changes start rolling out widely.

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