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Google has announced that it will be making some changes to how viewing photos and videos from inside the Google Drive app and web interface is handled early next year. The change will affect all tiers of G Suite customers, and will move the viewing to right inside the Drive interface, eliminating the special tab for Google Photos. Instead, users will have to check a box in settings that automatically creates a folder in Drive for Google Photos items, and they can then find them in there and view them like they would any other media inside their Google Drive. It’s worth noting that the app and web interface for Google Photos will remain unchanged, allowing users to find their photos and videos there like they always have. The changes will take effect early into January of 2018.
In the current incarnation of Google Drive, there’s a separate tab where a user can view their Google Photos items. While this can be convenient for working across Photos and Drive, it’s not hard to see how the feature could be considered redundant. This is especially true in the kind of fast-paced professional settings where G Suite deployments are most likely to be used. Those outside of the G Suite umbrella, such as Google Apps for Education users, will not see any changes to the way their Google Drive apps work.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that Google is gearing the G Suite versions of their apps more and more for streamlined functionality, meant to be run in parallel with other apps in the G Suite family. While this change makes it pretty evident, the splitting up of Hangouts into two separate apps for G Suite users not long ago was another fairly obvious hint at what kind of vision Google has for G Suite and how its users should be taking advantage of the unique way that apps in the G Suite stable work together. Thus far, almost none of the major changes that have hit G Suite apps have gone to the consumer versions available on Google Play or on the web, and it will presumably stay that way.
