#ux engineering

Building the Google Photos Web UI

A few years ago I had the privilege of being an engineer on the Google Photosteam and part of the initial launch in 2015. A lot of people contributed to the product — designers, product managers, researchers, and countless engineers (across Android, iOS, Web, and the server) to name just some of the major roles. My responsibility was the web UI, and more specifically the photo grid.

We wanted to try something ambitious and simultaneously support a full-width (justified) layout, preserve the aspect–ratio of each photo, be scrubbable (ie let you jump to any section of your archive), handle hundreds-of-thousands of photos, scroll at 60fps, and load near instantly.

At the time no other photo gallery supported all of this, and to the best of my knowledge they still don’t. While many other galleries now support some of these features they usually square crop each photo to make the layout work.

Here is a technical write up about how we solved those challenges, and a peek under the hood of how the web version of Google Photos works.