Google Photos has been updated and no longer allows you to share screenshots
Have you tried sharing a screenshot via Google Photos recently? If so, you may have encountered some difficulties doing so.
Google Photos has a feature called “Share with Collaborator” (found under the “Shared” menu). This utility allows us to give someone else automatic access to everything we upload to Google Photos as of a certain date.
It's a very useful tool in family or work environments, for example, since this way we avoid having to grant access every time we upload a new photo to the cloud. However, the latest update to Google Photos has put a new limit on what we can share in this way.
- No more sharing anything that doesn't come from the camera app.
The “Share with Collaborator” feature now only allows you to share photos taken with your phone’s camera. That means any screenshot, WhatsApp image, or image downloaded from the internet is blocked and cannot be shared through Google Photos.
Although the company has not provided an official explanation, the app's terms and conditions have been updated, and now display the following message: "Photos from other apps on Android are not shared with the collaborator's account."
This is a very strong limitation, because as some Reddit users point out, they can't even share photos they take with their phones if they're using a third-party camera app instead of the official camera that comes pre-installed on the phone.
So, if you want to continue sharing screenshots, you'll have to use Google Drive, or switch directly to other cloud storage apps like Amazon Photos, a very similar service offered by the online sales giant.