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Google Photos

Services Product Design
Year 2025
Collaboration Google Creative Lab
Google Photos product design cover

The challenge

Google Photos has more than 1.5 billion monthly users and over 9 trillion photos and videos stored. Most people use it as a backup: they save their photos and rarely open the app again. With Gemini becoming Google's main AI tool for creating, the question was whether people could make things in Photos as well as keep them there.

My approach

I led design with Google Creative Lab on a new Create space in Photos. The aim was to put AI creation tools inside the app people already use, so they felt like part of Photos rather than something added on. I worked from whole flows down to individual interactions. Most of the time went on working out which new habits a product with a billion users could take on.

The result

The work became a set of production-ready concepts, a plan for positioning Photos as a creative tool, and ideas ready to launch that now feed into Google's wider generative AI roadmap. I set it up so the Photos team could keep building on it.

Google Photos Create screen introducing Stickers, above a Creation Tools grid of Sticker, ReStyle, Collage and more Three phones showing the Create tab: the Stickers launch, a feed of creations and recipes, and a personalised Made For You grid ReStyle flow: choosing an art style like Muppets, then picking a photo from the library to restyle A ReStyle result rendering, then a finished Muppets-style portrait with share and keep-creating options Recipe step selecting part of a restyled image to turn into a sticker, before continuing Choosing a sticker finish, previewing the Jelly and Prismatic effects on the cut-out