HTC Gallery, the stock photo app for the OEM's devices, received a fairly significant update today. It now supports tagging photos, has a "Face Fusion" photo editing tool, a new timeline layout for browsing photos, and has laid the groundwork for cloud integration. And while you can only download on HTC devices from the Play Store, our APK download should work on most devices that are running KitKat or newer.

By tagging, I mean the kind with words, not the kind you do on Facebook. For instance, I could tag all of my screenshots for Android Police with "Android Police" and then search for them when needed.

HTC has also added some refinements to photo browsing with the timeline view. You can set it to grid or feed, the main difference being whether you want each image to take up all of the horizontal space.

HTC says in the Play Store "What's New" section that you can "browse your photos and videos in the cloud," but also that this feature is "coming soon in some regions." I don't see any evidence of this cloud integration on my M7 Google Play Edition, but this could be something specific to Sense ROMs. A similar "coming soon" caveat was added regarding the ability to search tags on Facebook and Flickr, and I likewise do not see any evidence of that feature yet. This may be a server side switch that HTC will flip when ready.

This is a really nice photo gallery app. For my limited purposes, I think I prefer it to the Google Photos app that comes on Google Play Edition ROMs. While HTC didn't intend for non-Sense devices to run this app, it might make your photo browsing and sharing experience better.

Download

The APK is signed by HTC and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for HTC to push this download to your devices, which can take days (or you may never get it at all), download and install it just like any other APK.

File name: com.htc.album-9.00.844674-862090334-minAPI19.apk

Version: 9.00.844674 (862090334) (Android 4.4+)

MD5: 070ac75f560e538f3ec086f27b2aaf10