Google Photos
- 1.5B+Monthly users
- 9T+Photos and videos stored
- 210MEdits per month
The challenge
Google Photos has more than 1.5 billion monthly users and over 9 trillion photos and videos stored. But for most people it's a cloud locker. Memories go in, occasionally come out, and the rest of the time the app sits quiet. With Gemini emerging as Google's main creative AI surface, the question was whether Photos could become somewhere people actively make things, not just store them.
My approach
I led design on a new "Create" paradigm with Google Creative Lab. The aim was to surface AI-powered creation moments inside the existing Photos UX, so they felt like a natural extension of the app rather than a separate bolt-on. The work ran from end-to-end flows down to component-level interaction. Most of the time went to figuring out which new behaviours a billion-user product could actually absorb.
The result
The work landed as a set of production-ready concepts, a strategic framework for repositioning Photos as a creative tool, and a pipeline of launch-ready ideas now feeding into Google's broader generative AI roadmap. The output was structured so the wider Photos team could keep building from it.
