Google has moved the Memories tab from the Photos app’s home screen. Don’t worry, the feature hasn’t been removed from the app.
For reference, Google had introduced Memories in 2023 to help users to revisit their old photos and videos from years ago, by curating some interesting pictures. Actually, there is a widget in the Photos app, which is also called Memories, it was released in 2021, and it kind of serves the same purpose.
A widget is cool, but it is easier to view Memories via a dedicated page. As I mentioned earlier, you can still access the scrapbook-like feature, but it has been moved to a new place. Memories are now part of Collections in the Google Photos app. The new section appears at the top of your image gallery, but it is no longer called Memories. It has been renamed to Moments.
Here’s something weirder, do you see the carousel at the top of the app’s main screen?, i.e. Photos, well it is called Memories. That’s not confusing at all, right? I’m not entirely sure why this was done, but there it is.
You can access your Moments from the Collections tab to add more details to the images and videos, search for something specific, or share them with your loved ones.
The Google Photos home screen on the other hand is now simpler, with just three options on the bottom bar: Photos, Collections and Ask/Search. This is what the Mountain View company was going for, to make the main page more compact. It did the same thing with Google Maps, so at least there is some uniformity in the design.
This change isn’t something that happened out of the blue, Google began pushing this change last year in the Photos app for iOS, before it was introduced in the Android version.
According to 9to5Google, the removal of the Memories tab started in January this year, but it seems to be rolling out on a wider basis with Google Photos version 7.2.0 on Android and iOS. If you don’t see the Moments section on your phone yet, you may want to check the Play Store or the iOS App Store manually to see if an update is available for the app.
Tip: Check out Martin’s article to learn how to use Google Takeout to organize your Photos automatically.
This renaming/redesign may feel like an unnecessary change to some users, and I agree. Memories was a fine name, renaming it was pointless, and now it takes an extra step to access your Moments, that doesn’t make sense either. It’s not like the shortcut was taking up a lot of space on the bar, and phone screens are getting bigger not smaller, resizing the icons to fit more options would be the user-friendlier choice. Burying options under menus and subsections usually result in fewer people using a feature.
Oh well, it’s just one of those Google things! I wouldn’t be surprised if these redesigns were done to make room for adding some AI-powered options in the future.