Two years later, Google Photos may finally gain this cool iOS photo trick

When Apple released iOS 17 about two years ago, it added a feature that instantly garnered a lot of attention. The feature allowed iPhone users to tap and hold on any image to select the subject and convert it into a sticker that can be used across different messaging apps or used as a separate background-free image. It became an instant hit, which prompted Android manufacturers, including Samsung, Xiaomi, and OnePlus, to follow suit and bring it to their respective photo gallery apps.

Besides these brands, Google also implemented a similar functionality in Photos to make it more widely accessible, but limited it to iOS users at the time of its launch earlier this year. On the sidelines, however, it has been testing the functionality for Android users and is now making progress toward making it a reality.

We’ve encountered hints in the Photos app on Android suggesting that Google may be close to bringing the sticker feature to the platform soon. We were able to tinker our way into enabling the function in version 7.55 of the Google app on Android.

Here’s a video of the feature we activated on Android. Note that this has yet to go live for everyone:

Much like iOS, you can tap and hold over the primary subject in a photo to select it. When Photos detects the gesture, a shimmer appears around its outline, suggesting that it has been selected.

Once the subject is selected, a Copy button appears automatically. When you tap it, the image generates a preview, just as with a screenshot, and you can tap it to crop or edit it. Alternatively, if you just tap copy but do not edit the image, it can be pasted into other apps using Gboard’s clipboard functionality — so long as you have enabled it on your Android device.

Unlike iOS, however, these images do not automatically get saved to sticker packs in your messaging apps, and may need to be saved manually.

Additionally, we’ve discovered code that hints at other ways to save the image. The following strings suggest that the images will be stored under the Collections tab in Google Photos.

However, we don’t see the save functionality working at the moment, suggesting Google may still need to add more than finishing touches before shipping it out to a broader audience. We’ll update once that happens.