Magic Gallery With Every New Device Wallpaper Shows Google Photos' Weakness
Today we were graced with the gift of a gallery that magically updates whenever a new smart device is released. This gallery seemed to be giving us every wallpaper from every major smartphone over the past several years. It was made by a stick figure man by the name of Umeda Ishan, and at first it seemed pretty great, in a web browser, on a desktop machine. But once we get to the mobile app, everything went wrong.
The idea was great – and Umeda Ishan's work over the past several years has been top-notch. He's somehow found access to all the most major devices and their homepage wallpapers, including live wallpapers, and he's uploaded the lot to this gallery system. Google Photos shared albums system should be great for this, right?
It SHOULD be great, yes, but as it turns out, Google Photos isn't particularly prepared for such a large undertaking. It would seem instead that Google Photos sharing system was prepared for friends and family members sharing albums, but when we get to this size of a share, things fall apart.
When we look at the "AREA39-X" shared gallery on a desktop machine, the gallery looks pretty great. We see a device like the unreleased smartphone Mi 10 Pro up top, followed by a few wallpapers from the brand new Samsung Galaxy Z Flip. We see image files and videos – the videos can be seen in a phone with a 3rd-party app that allows videos to be used as live wallpapers.
When we join the album from a desktop web browser, we should be able to see the album in our mobile Google Photos app. We're logged in with the same account – but no dice! When we hit the menu button and tap "Show in Albums" – that should be the key.
Instead, we must share the link to the album via a messenger app, then open the link, and re-add the album to our Albums view. Even then, the album seems to want to disappear at random, and must be re-added.
Once we start to browse through the album, the sheer bulk of imagery and video media makes the system buckle under the pressure. If we tap the "View Activity", it's madness. Scrolling through messages makes the app shudder, and the content of the messages that appear here show how fast the popularity of this system deteriorates.
So while this COULD be a great place to share imagery such as this, it's clear Google Photos wasn't made for such a thing. If only there were a way to make the changes to allow for the social nature of the share to stay stable – we'd have... oh wait, we already had that, it was called Google+, and it's gone now. Maybe it'll come back one day if the demand is great enough? We shall see!