Photo Picker Gets a Power Boost in Android 16—Here’s What’s New

Google had introduced the Photo Picker tool with its Android 13 operating system. It would allow the user to specify which images a particular app can access. It is a great way to give limited gallery access to the applications. The Photo Picker tool is now getting some new features in Android 16 that would improve its overall usability.

Photo Picker gets new features in Android 16 Canary build

As per an APK teardown done by the folks at Android Authority, the new photo picker tool in Android 16’s canary build and August 2025 play system update has got slew of new features. The first change made to the tool is the addition of a new feature that would allow users to pinch to zoom in/zoom out the photo grid. It’s a nice way to see multiple photos at once, on the screen.

The users can also choose multiple images by simply tapping and dragging on the images. Previously, it was only possible to select multiple images by tapping on each image individually. It was kind of time-consuming and frustrating. However, with the newer version, a user can do a simple tap and drag to select multiple images at once.

Alongside the aforementioned features, the photo picker gets a new redesigned photo collection menu. It gets two new folders: from your device and from your apps. As the name implies, the former folder will contain the images stored locally on your devices, whereas the latter will contain images coming from apps like Telegram and Instagram.

These features are indeed a quality addition, and they would improve the usability of the photo picker tool. However, do keep in mind that these features are part of Android 16’s canary build. And since it is still in testing, it is not guaranteed that the stable version will have the same replica of the tool. We may have to wait for a few more weeks to hear anything about the release of Android 16‘s photo picker tool’s new features.