What you need to know
- A dive into the Google Drive app highlighted the company’s work at bringing a new document-scanning feature to users.
- It was spotted that Google could let users save their scanned documents as JPG files, creating a high-quality save of every scanned page.
- Google Drive was recently spotted working on a new category system for users that would help them re-discover the most important files.
Users working with documents and PDFs might gain a useful upgrade in quality for what they upload to Google Drive.
As spotted by Android Authority in an APK search, Google is working on a way to save scanned documents as .jpeg files alongside the usual PDF option. A few strings point toward this coming functionality in the latest version of Drive, v2.24.2. Strings like “jpeg_format_label” refer to the .jpeg save option while the “ds_jpeg_quality_summary” tag is for the quality of saved pages.
It looks like Google will let users personally set the level of quality for scanned documents, according to its code. One string refers to the JPEG default quality, which is seemingly set at 80. This will likely be shown beneath the “quality_title” highlighted in the code.
Additionally, Drive’s JPEG option for scanned documents will create multiple files if the JPEG option is desired. The Google Drive app shows a string that reads “jpeg_multipage_explanation.” Its description details that “saving as JPG will create multiple files.”
The publication speculates that Drive will create a high-quality image of every page within that uploaded document for user convenience.
JPEG files will likely be a boon to users trying to send pages of important information, especially if a PDF file isn’t accepted. For now, this is just a discovery, so we’ll have to wait and see when/if Google rolls it out to users.
With better document scanning (hopefully) on the way, Google was spotted working on a better category system for Drive. The discovery in its Android app showed that users could soon gain a customizable category filter on the “Home” tab. Categories like auto, banking, expenses, home, IDS, insurance, and more were found.
Google intends to let users choose which categories mean the most and display them in a row at the top of the Home tab. A new “Manage categories” option will join this update, available in the three-dot menu of a document. Tapping it will let users assign certain tags (categories) to a document for easy discovery.
Also, in April, Google brought Drive’s useful search upgrade, which launched first on iOS, to Android users. Folks can quickly search for files they’ve modified recently and other modifiers like “File Type” and “Owner.”