
First discovered by 9to5Google, the ability to change your Chrome OS wallpaper directly using Google Photos may soon be inbound as a feature. Kyle Bradshaw discovered a new Chromium Repository feature flag that’s being developed that will integrate the popular photo storage and sharing service directly into the Wallpaper picker.
Add feature flag for Google Photos integration in wallpaper app.
This CL adds the feature flag to gate Google Photos integration in the wallpaper app. It uses the flag to reserve a new tile in the existing <collections-grid> that will serve as the entry point for the new integration. Note that the new tile will be in a perpetual loading for the time being.
Chromium Repository
According to the commit seen above, a new tile will exist in the “Collections Grid”, presumably in the second slot right next to the “My images” tile that appears first, that will link out directly to Google Photos. This will not be fully implemented once the flag can be enabled on Canary devices because the developers need to do some work connecting the service to your “local” machine.
The most exciting aspect of this update is that it indicates a closer Photos integration with the OS – something we haven’t seen much of up until this point. You used to be able to access the service while using the file picker experiment in Android apps that the company played with for a while before killing off. At this time, it’s uncertain whether or not this will appear in the wild again, but there is still some hope that this is being worked on.
To date, many of us have resorted to storing our wallpapers in Drive in a folder named as such, and then visiting it in the Files app and pinning it to the left side for quick access. This method sure beats downloading wallpapers from the Google Photos web app, but when the devs bake this right into the new wallpaper picker, we’ll all be happy.
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