Google's Tinder-style photo deletion tool actually works — here's why
Android Police 2026-07-02 12:00:11
Context: Google launched a Tinder-style interface for its Google One app last year, allowing users to quickly delete photos and manage storage in a more engaging way. The feature, which gamifies the experience of saving space, has been spotted on both Google One and Google Photos, although it's only accessible in the former app. This tool has helped some users, including the author, clean up their large libraries of photos and videos.
Key Facts
- Google started rolling out a redesigned Google One app in November 2025, which included the Tinder-style deletion tool and gamified the experience of saving space.
- The tool allows users to swipe left to mark a photo for deletion and right to skip it, with a progress bar at the top showing how far they need to go to delete 1GB of media.
- When users achieve the goal of deleting 1GB of media, the progress bar displays a celebratory animation featuring thumbs-up and star emojis, and adds further goals in 0.5GB or 0.4GB increments.
- The author found the tool to be particularly useful for quickly deleting large videos and photos, with Google autoplaying each video when swiped to, making it easy to determine whether to keep or delete it.
- Some users have reported a pop-up in Google Photos prompting them to delete photos, which appears when they take a large number of photos in one day, although the author was unable to trigger it.