QuickPic, the best Gallery replacement for Android Lollipop

One of the changes to Android Lollipop that’s not going over too well is the fact that Google has, in one fell swoop, removed the gallery app for viewing your image folders, forcing you to use the annoying and slow Photos app that was formerly used for syncing pics with your cloud account. Luckily there are many other alternatives, with QuickPic being one of the best app galleries you can find for smartphone.

For starters, the default way to display the gallery folders is practically identical to the disappeared app, although you can also view them in mosaic form, as a list of folders with additional information, or even through a file explorer for your memory or SD card. It’s quick and easy both to access the tool and subfolders and upload images; in fact, it even seems a bit faster than the native app. Where have you been all this time, QuickPic?

But what makes the app truly powerful is the option to manage all your image galleries attached to external apps: by opening the left drop-down menu you’ll see a list where you can see all of them, whether in Dropbox, Google Drive, or Picasa, as well as many others like Flickr, OneDrive, or 500px, all integrated into the global interface. You can even organize the images according to geolocation data, if they have it. A bit like the ‘Stories’ on Google Plus or Facebook.

Nor does it come up short in terms of extra features, with a functional image editor where you can rotate, stretch, resize, or crop images as desired, along your standard options to share and even shuffle things around in your file system. It also includes an interesting option to sync photos between two devices connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

It’s unclear whether Google will fix this error and bring back the gallery as an optional tool, although everything indicates that they won’t in order to push users to directly or indirectly have to use their sync tool and thereby have to shell out for more cloud storage space. That said, it’s only a matter of time before someone extracts the APK of the Gallery app from Android 4.4 to install it ‘extraofficially’. All in good time.