New shortcut option appears in Google Photos app

Over the weekend users of the Google Photos app may have noticed they had a new card showing up in the Assistant portion of the app alerting them to a new feature. The card indicates users can add a shortcut to “Jump from Camera to Google Photos” and it does just what it says, which is to provide a quick way for users to jump from their camera app over to the Google Photos app.

The card that shows up in Assistant is just a way for Google to alert users to this new option. If you happen to swipe it away by accident or otherwise want to enable or disable this option, you can head to the Settings for Google Photos. There you will find the toggle switch for the “Camera shortcut” so you can turn it on or off.

Turning on this option causes a new behavior to appear when you are using your camera app on your smartphone. Just snap a pic and after a moment you will see a small shortcut appear on the screen. The shortcut consists of a thumbnail image of the last picture you took along with a tiny Photos logo in the corner. Tapping on the shortcut will launch the Google Photos app to the picture shown in the thumbnail where you can proceed to edit, share or do whatever else you were planning to do in Google Photos.

If you press and hold on the shortcut, you can move it around on the screen although there is no way to drag it off of the screen. You can get rid of it by tapping on it to go to Google Photos, swiping left to open the Google Photos app manually, or existing the camera app and then restarting it.

If you do not have the Google Photos app, you can install it using the Play Store link below.