Google Messages is making it easier to share from Google Photos

Google Messages makes it easy to share photos and videos from your phone, but accessing your cloud library isn’t as seamless as it could be. Currently, tapping the gallery button opens a media picker showing your most recent locally stored images. To access your Google Photos library, you need to tap the “Folders” button — an extra, slightly inconvenient step. Fortunately, an upcoming Google Messages update will integrate your cloud photos and videos directly into the main media picker, removing that extra step entirely.

Like many other apps, Google Messages uses its own custom media picker to let you select photos and videos. This is because a custom picker allows for tighter UI integration than Android’s system Photo Picker. For example, Google Messages shows the camera viewfinder and gallery side-by-side — a design that’s only possible with a custom picker. In contrast, Android’s Photo Picker launches as a separate screen on top of apps, which would feel disconnected from the Google Messages experience.

While Google’s custom media picker feels more integrated, it comes with significant limitations. For one, it can only access locally stored photos and videos, forcing you to tap an extra “Folders” button to open Android’s system Photo Picker and reach your Google Photos library.

This extra step is a minor inconvenience, but a bigger problem is security. Google’s custom picker requires broad access to your entire media gallery to function. In contrast, Android’s Photo Picker allows apps to access only the specific photos and videos you select, without needing invasive permissions. Despite these security and convenience drawbacks, developers prefer custom pickers because they believe the benefits of a tightly integrated UI outweigh the cons.

To solve these problems and encourage developers to adopt the system Photo Picker, Android 16 introduces a new “embedded” photo picker. This update provides new APIs that allow apps to integrate the system’s photo picker directly into their own interface. This gives developers the best of both worlds: a media gallery that feels native to their app while retaining the security and privacy benefits of the system photo picker, as they no longer need to request broad media permissions.

We recently spotted this feature in action in Google Messages on a few devices. On my OnePlus 13 running OxygenOS 16, Google Messages has replaced its custom media picker with the embedded photo picker. Now, when I tap the gallery button, my cloud-hosted photos and videos appear right alongside my local files. The embedded picker even sits side-by-side with the camera viewfinder, just like the old one did, creating a seamless experience that most people won’t even notice is technically no longer part of the Google Messages app.

As a consequence of this change, the Google Messages app no longer needs the “Photos and videos” permission to share photos or videos. If you previously granted Messages this permission, you can now revoke it once the new embedded photo picker rolls out.

For now, the new embedded photo picker appears to be exclusive to Android 16 devices, as our Android 15 devices still show the old interface. Interestingly, this isn’t because the feature requires Android 16. It’s actually supported on Android 14 and later, but it depends on a recent Google Play System Update. Google may be limiting the initial rollout to Android 16 users while they wait for that required update to reach a wider range of devices.

Are you seeing the new embedded photo picker in your Google Messages app? Let us know in the comments below!