Chrome OS will soon have a way to set your wallpaper to one of your favorite images or albums from Google Photos.
Across Pixel phones, Chromecasts, and Nest smart displays, Google has made it all too easy to set your wallpaper to your favorite shot from Google Photos or run a slideshow from an album. Meanwhile, to use something from Google Photos as a wallpaper on Chrome OS today, you need to download the image and manually set it as your background. There also isn’t an option to rotate through a local folder of images.
According to a newly posted code change, Chrome OS’s Wallpapers app is set to get a full integration with Google Photos. Once complete, Google Photos will appear among the “collections” available in the Wallpapers app, alongside options like “Dessert time,” “Cityscapes,” and “Local images.”
This CL adds the feature flag to gate Google Photos integration in the wallpaper app. It uses the flag to reserve a new tile in the existing <collections-grid> that will serve as the entry point for the new integration. Note that the new tile will be in a perpetual loading for the time being.
Notably, the Google Photos option is only being made available for the upcoming redesign of the Chrome OS Wallpapers app. In that redesign, which first appeared in January, the current list-based design is switched out for a grid layout with each category appearing in a tile. To get that redesign — currently only available on non-stable versions of Chrome OS — you need to use a flag in chrome://flags.
Enable new wallpaper experience
Enables the wallpaper picker in ChromeOS Settings — Chrome OS
#wallpaper-webui
Once the the integration goes live, “Google Photos” will be available in the second slot. It’s not yet clear what options will be available for using your Google Photos, such as picking a specific album to cycle through or if automatic cycling will be offered at all. Things will become more clear as the feature is gradually developed.
For comparison, Chrome OS already has some Google Photos capabilities in its screensaver option which can cycle through an album of your choosing. It would be a surprise if the Wallpapers app wasn’t at least that capable. Considering the integration is only just beginning development, we likely won’t see the option to use Google Photos go live until at least Chrome OS version 97 or 98, set to release in January and February 2022, respectively.
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Author: Kyle Bradshaw
Source: 9TO5Google
