Google Photos partner sharing just became a lot less convenient

One of the many convenient features Google Photos offers is partner sharing. It’s a feature that allows you to easily share your library of images with others automatically. Since its launch in 2017, you could share any image in your library. However, that has now changed after a recent update.

First spotted by TechIssuesToday, Google quietly released a support update within the last month that has stripped away partner sharing’s ability to share any image. In a support page for the feature, you’ll now see an excerpt that says “Photos from other apps on Android aren’t shared with your partner account.” This stipulation wasn’t there before the update rolled out.

Users will still be able to share their photos with others, but screenshots, downloaded images, and photos from third-party apps are now filtered out. It’s unclear exactly how the feature is able to tell which photos didn’t come from the default camera, but internet sleuths believe the answer is in the metadata.

Every image carries metadata that provides information on one or more aspects of the picture. So a screenshot would have metadata that identifies it as a screenshot. So it’s possible the feature is looking at this information before it decides whether to block or share.

With this change rolled out, it looks like sharing these types of photos will be a little trickier going forward. It’s unclear why Google would suddenly place this restriction on the feature after all of these years.