The photo picker is one of those aspects that we don’t focus on too much as Android users, yet it serves an important purpose. Last month, Google began rolling out a handy search bar for the photo picker with the August 2025 Google Play system update. It now looks like more improvements are on the way for a future Play system update.
Analyzing the recently released Android 16 QPR2 Beta 3 update, Android Authority contributor Mishaal Rahman discovered a couple of changes to Android’s photo picker.
The more prominent of the two inclusions is a dedicated timeline scrubber that highlights the month and year as you scroll, thereby making it easier to filter your photos based on when they were captured or saved.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because Google Photos also offers an identical timeline-based scrolling feature. This new addition to the photo picker will complement the existing Photos and Collections tabs, which allow you to filter the selection of images and videos to some extent, as well as the search bar we mentioned above.
The photo picker’s search functionality also gets better
The updated photo picker with timeline-based scrolling (image 1) and the new voice search experience (images 2 and 3)
Separately, Rahman also spotted another change to the photo picker in Android 16 QPR2 Beta 3, adding to the recently included search experience. In its current form, the photo picker’s search tab only lets you type in keywords manually. However, the newest Android 16 beta also offers a dedicated voice search option, illustrated with the familiar microphone icon.
This is arguably the more minor feature of the two, but it goes to show that Google isn’t quite done with making useful tweaks to Android’s photo picker. As for the availability of these two enhancements, Rahman notes that a future Google Play system update will bring them to other Android devices. For now, the changes are only live on the Android 16 QPR2 Beta 3 release.
Though these features are certainly beneficial, they’re not enough reason to get the latest Android beta on your primary Android phone, particularly if you’re not accustomed to running beta firmware. There’s no word on when exactly the Play system update carrying these two enhancements will be pushed to other Android devices, but we hope it won’t be a long wait.
