Google Photos finally lets you trash photos directly from albums on Android, but there’s a catch

Google Photosis unarguably the best way to manage your ever-expanding media library. While the big G has made steady improvements to the photo organizing service, it does have its share of odd quirks. One such oddity has been the inability to directly trash photos from an album from the Android app. The feature has been available on the web for years but was missing from the mobile app for some reason.

In a better-late-than-never move, Google has silently fixed this quirk in the Google Photos Android app, but with a catch. There’s now an option to directly trash photos from an album in the Android app; however, it is only available for private albums. In shared albums, you will continue to have to first remove the photos from the album, find them in the library, and then proceed to delete them from there. This limitation is not there on the web, where it’s possible to directly move photos to trash from a shared album.

Android Police founder Artem Russakovskii first brought the inability to move photos to trash from albums using the Google Photos Android app to the attention of David Lieb, Product Lead of Google Photos, nearly three years ago. Despite the executive promising the “team is on that,” the option has arrived only now.

What’s odd is that the ability to move photos directly to the trash in shared albums has also been present in the iOS version of the app for some time. So, it is unclear why Google has not added this trivial feature for shared albums and what took it so long to even add the button for private albums on Android in the first place. This is an annoying issue with the service that makes managing shared albums from mobile a bit harder than it should be.

The Google Photos app displayed on a phone screen