Chrome OS Gallery gets a shiny, new icon shortly after images opened in Google Photos

The Chrome OS gallery app has rocked the same tired, old logo for some time now, and while it did receive an update in the past, it wasn’t that stunning. For some, iconography isn’t that exciting, but every time I see an update to one of the system web apps, I know that Google is poking around and planning something big.

Today on Chrome OS Canary 98, I noticed that the gallery app itself has received a brand spanking new icon, and you can see it in the image below. I had to recreate it since it only appeared very small on my device’s shelf, but it’s essentially just two polaroid photos stacked on one another in a red circle, and in the center, there are some magical sparkles.

For anyone who’s familiar with the auto-adjust feature in Google Photos, you’ll know that these look nearly identical, aside from their placement. Opening any media, be it a photo, video, or so on launches this new gallery visual, and it’s super nice! So why does the company want to replace this imagery now, and what could it possibly mean for the future?

Well, that’s where this gets truly exciting! Just yesterday, I tested the same process of opening a photo on my Chromebook in Canary mode, and guess what? Every photo I opened, whether locally stored or via Drive in the Files app opened in Google Photos! That’s right, the Google Photos icon launched at the bottom of my shelf, showed me the image, and provided little to no navigation options. Unlike Gallery, I wasn’t able to shift to the next photo.

The most shocking part of this is that I don’t have the Google Photos Play Store application installed on my device, which means that these locally stored images are launching in the Google Photos web app. I checked my Photos on the web, and the images I opened on the device were not uploaded. Instead, it seems that Photos is acting as a photo viewer.

Shortly after this occurred, this new Gallery application icon appeared in its place, which made me quite sad, to say the least. Was it a short-lived experiment and nothing more, or was it an accidental (or intentional) slip of exciting future plans? You be the judge.

We’ve seen for quite some time that Google has had plans to integrate its photo sharing and storage service into Chrome OS, and has even gone so far as to integrate it into the Wallpaper app. This has yet to roll out, and the new experience will be called “Personalization Hub”, but that in and of itself is huge. Add to that the fact that they let slip that images stored in your local hard drive would also be previewable in Google Photos, the new iconography, and so on, and you can start to see what the company is cooking up, or at least testing.

Most of the other system web applications have received iconography refreshes in the past. In fact, it’s occurred twice, and pretty much every app has been touched by Google magic. Most recently, the Crosh terminal app split off from the web and got its own SWA wrapper, complete with a cute little block icon. Anyway, this is a seemingly innocuous update that I believe has larger implications for the company’s Google Photos integration plans. Users have wanted this for some time now, and I’m happy to say it looks like it could be happening sooner than we think.