How Google Photos’ Web UI Masters Speed, Scale, and Stunning Layouts
Secrets Revealed: How Google Photos Built a Lightning-Fast Web UI Ever wondered how Google Photos delivers a seamless web experience, even with millions of photos? As a former engineer on the Google Photos team during its 2015 launch, I helped build the web UI, focusing on the photo grid. Our goal was ambitious: a full-width, aspect-ratio-preserving layout that’s scrubbable, handles hundreds of thousands of photos, scrolls at 60fps, and feels instantaneous. Here’s how we pulled it off. Why Was This So Hard? Two massive challenges stood in our way: size and speed. Huge Metadata : Users with large collections—some with over 250,000 photos—generate megabytes of metadata (URLs, dimensions, timestamps). Sending it all at once would ruin our instant-loading goal. Photo Size : Modern HDPI thumbnails (50KB+ each) add up quickly. Loading thousands could slow browsers to a crawl or crash them, as seen in older Google+ Photos, which lagged after 1,000–2,000 photos and crashed at 10,000. ...