ChromeOS Canary adds a Google Photos album view in latest Personalization Hub update

Last week, I discovered that the rumored Google Photos integration with the chromeOS Canary Personalization Hub was live, but at the time, it was pretty broken. In fact, it wouldn’t even load properly unless you waited a handful of minutes. Needless to say, this is a feature in development, and more than anything, I was just excited to see that users will finally be able to pick a wallpaper right from the cloud without having to create and pin a Drive folder in the Files app called “Wallpapers” or having to manually download pictures of loved ones from Google Photos before applying them locally.

However, once the Google Photos collection did load in the Wallpaper picker, I was disappointed to find that the only way to locate photos was by date in an endless stream that mimicked the main tab of Photos on the web. I complained that there was no album view to quickly and efficiently locate what’s important to you.

Today, I woke up to exactly that being added on chromeOS Canary after an update! As you can see below, the Personalization Hub’s Wallpaper picker now has an “Albums” tab right next to the “Photos” tab under the Google Photos collection, and it works exactly as you’d expect. Once clicked, all of your Google Photos albums load right up, and you can select what you want to apply to your Chromebook with just a few clicks.

Well, you would be able to if your photos would load. As I said, this is currently being developed and is not yet ready for everyone to use on chromeOS Stable, so there are bound to be a few things broken. At this time, you can load up said albums from your Google Account, but many of the albums beyond the thumbnail on the front cover simply do not load yet.

The addition of this though proves that we’re getting extremely close to a public release of this feature, and as the Personalization Hub comes together with the new, more Googley “Float on by” screensaver, the profile image video looping feature, the new “Radiance” wallpaper collection that auto swaps between light and dark mode based on your Chromebook’s system settings, and more, the entire Personalization Hub app is likely going to be dropped for everyone to play around with sooner rather than later, and I’m extremely excited for that!