Every picture and clip you can reach, in one flat stream, ordered by when it was taken.

Folders are how files are organised. A gallery is how photos are looked at. Mixing the two would make it neither, so this is deliberately not a folder listing with a filter on it: there are no folders in the gallery at all.

Ordered by when it was taken

The default order is capture time, read out of the file's own metadata, not upload time.

Those are genuinely different. A photo taken in 2019 and uploaded today has an upload time of today, and a gallery sorted by that puts it at the top, which is wrong. The server reads the capture time when it first processes the file and stores it separately.

Anything with no capture time, a screenshot or a download, falls back to when it was uploaded. Without that fallback every one of them would pile up at one end of the timeline.

You can also order by date added, date modified, name, or file size.

Headings

The timeline is broken into runs with a heading over each: by day, by month (the default), or by year. The two most recent days say "Today" and "Yesterday" rather than a date, because on a photo timeline that is what they almost always are.

Headings stay pinned while their own section is on screen, so it is always clear which month is being looked at.

Grouping only applies to a time-based order. Sorting by file size and then grouping by month would produce headings that do not match the order underneath them, so the option goes quiet rather than offering something that cannot be drawn.

The grid

Masonry, not squares. A square grid crops every photo to fit, and a panorama then looks like a close-up of its middle. Each picture keeps its own shape.

That is only possible because the server records pixel dimensions when it processes an image, so the grid lays itself out correctly before a single thumbnail has arrived. The difference is a grid that settles instantly versus one that reflows for a second every time it opens.

Rotation is accounted for: a photo whose stored pixels are a quarter turn from how it is meant to be seen gets its dimensions swapped, so it does not land in a landscape slot.

Changing the tile size. Pinch on a phone. On desktop there is a row of size steps in the top bar, because a mouse has no pinch and a hidden keyboard shortcut is not a control.

Looking at one

Tapping a photo grows it out of its own tile into full screen, at full resolution rather than the grid's thumbnail. The entire reason for opening a photo is to look at it properly.

Swipe sideways to move through the gallery in the order it was showing. Tap once to hide the chrome and see the picture with nothing on top of it.

The bar underneath carries share, download, keep offline, and star, and the line above it says when the photo was taken.

Selecting several

Long press on a phone, or click while a selection is active. Selected photos can be downloaded in one action.

Sharing stays one at a time. A share grants a specific person access to a specific item, so a multi-select share would be several separate decisions wearing one button, and the app says so rather than pretending otherwise.

Videos

Clips live in the gallery alongside photos, marked with a small badge and their own play affordance. They were taken on the same day with the same device, and splitting them into a separate screen would be the app imposing a distinction nobody thinks in.

Images are cached

Every remote image in the app, in the gallery and everywhere else, is fetched once and then read from disk. Scrolling back up a grid does not re-download a thumbnail that was on screen ten seconds ago.

While an image is loading its slot shows the app's own shimmer in the brand's greys, and the image fades in rather than popping. Thumbnails are decoded at roughly the size they are drawn at, because a screenful of full-resolution decodes is how a photo grid runs a phone out of memory.

Offline

A photo kept on this device shows a small mark in its corner and opens from local bytes with no connection at all. See Offline availability.