Prismatic Software Editorial Team
Code spotted in Google Photos version 8.0.0.1011730683 points to a dedicated "RAW images" category coming to the app's Collections tab, according to an APK teardown reported independently by Android Authority and Nerd's Chalk on November 4 (Android Authority) (Nerd's Chalk). Both outlets pulled the same strings from the same build, including a "RAW image" search query and matching empty-state text, which is about as close to independent confirmation as an unreleased feature gets.
A feature like this is a small UI addition on the surface, but under the hood it means parsing camera RAW metadata, indexing file type across a user's entire backed-up library, and surfacing that as a fast, reliable search filter on a phone — the kind of scoped, format-aware engineering a team usually brings in a mobile development team like YuSMP Group's to validate before it ships to hundreds of millions of Android users.
What the teardown found
According to Android Authority, the unreleased feature would consolidate every RAW file in a user's library into one organized spot inside the Collections tab, rather than leaving RAW photos scattered through the main grid with only a small badge to mark them (Android Authority). Nerd's Chalk, working from the same app version, found four new text strings tied to the feature: a "RAW images" category label, a "RAW image" search query, and two empty-state messages — "No RAW images" and "RAW photos in your library are shown here" (Nerd's Chalk).
Neither outlet could get the category to render in the live interface; both needed workarounds to surface it, and both flagged the standard APK-teardown caveat that work-in-progress code can change, sit behind a server-side flag indefinitely, or never ship at all.
Why RAW files get lost in a phone library
RAW backup itself isn't new — Google Photos has backed up RAW files by default for a few years now. The problem the new category seems to target is findability: once a RAW shot lands in a library with thousands of JPEGs, Live Photos, and screenshots, the only thing marking it as RAW today is a small badge in the corner of the thumbnail. For anyone shooting RAW on a phone specifically to retain editing headroom, that's a meaningful gap — the files worth the most post-processing attention are the hardest ones to find again.
That's the same underlying problem a desktop batch tool solves for photographers managing RAW output from a dedicated camera: once files are organized and tagged correctly, the actual conversion and export step is comparatively simple, which is the gap PhotoBatch is built to close once a folder of RAW originals has been sorted.
Why this is harder to ship than it sounds
A dedicated search category reads like a one-line filter, but Google Photos backs up images from an enormous range of phones and camera accessories, each writing RAW in its own container — DNG, proprietary manufacturer formats, and multi-frame computational variants all need to be recognized consistently before a "RAW images" label means anything. Getting that detection right across every device in the Android ecosystem, without flagging ordinary JPEGs or mislabeling edited files, is exactly the kind of narrowly scoped format-handling work that's easy to underestimate until it has to run correctly at scale.
It's also a reminder of how much mobile photo apps now do that desktop software used to handle alone: indexing format metadata, building fast on-device search, and keeping all of it consistent across a library that keeps growing in the background. Shipping that reliably on a phone, across thousands of hardware and OS combinations, is a different engineering problem than building the same filter for a desktop app with a known, controlled environment.
The bottom line
Nothing here is confirmed by Google, and APK-teardown features frequently stall before reaching a public release. But two independent teardowns landing on the same strings in the same build is a stronger signal than a single leak, and the feature itself points at a real gap: RAW files are common enough on phones now that losing them in a general photo grid is a genuine usability problem, not an edge case.
