Google Photos may soon let you do more than just love shared photos

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Google Photos already lets users share photos and albums with others, and it even lets people react or comment on shared photos. However, Google is now working on a more versatile reaction feature for photos shared in the app.

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While digging through the latest version of the Google Photos app (v7.90), we spotted a new reaction feature for shared photos. With a bit of tinkering, we managed to enable it and see how it works. Currently, when you’re viewing a shared photo within the app, you can tap on the “Like” button to react with a heart emoji.

With the new feature, users will see a redesigned set of buttons to like an image or add a custom reaction on the left side, and a comment button on the right. Tapping on the like button will simply add a heart emoji reaction to the photo. Meanwhile, tapping the emoji icon displays a floating reaction bar with suggested emoji reactions. Users will also be able to tap on the emoji icon in this reaction bar to open the full emoji picker and choose any emoji as a reaction.

This new feature could make shared photos a more social experience by letting users react to photos and videos with any emoji from the emoji picker. It’s also a better experience than the one we spotted Google working on last year, which offered only five emojis and added reactions as comments to photos.

From what we can see, the new reactions feature works as expected. Hopefully, Google will start rolling it out to users soon. We’ll keep an eye out for any further developments on this feature and update you as soon as new information becomes available.

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