Samsung is introducing a native Google Photos app to its 2026 smart TVs, and for the first time, Google’s popular photo service will be getting a fully featured, living room–ready experience.
The service will launch as Memories and grow over the year with creative and personalized content integrations into Samsung’s TV software.
Google Photos is finally available on Samsung smart TVs
Despite the fact that its service is on most people’s phones and computer browsers, Google Photos has never had a full-featured native app for TVs — not even for Android TV or Google TV. For the most part, households have resorted to casting, ambient screensavers, or third-party galleries to share photos on the big screen.
Stretching photos on a bigger screen
Photos have long been an intimate medium for sharing personal moments on smallish screens you hold in your hand or cradle on your desk. Now, natively bringing Photos to Samsung’s Tizen-based sets changes that dynamic and casts the TV as a shared canvas for family memories.
The scale is significant. Google previously cited over 1 billion users on Photos, with trillions of images stored and billions uploaded each week. Add to that Samsung’s long-held position as world leader in TV revenue share — about 20% according to Omdia — and you get a marriage that could dramatically change the way people experience their photo libraries at home.
How the app will work on launch for Samsung TVs
The Samsung TVs will feature the app’s first release, as the companies have brought so-called Memories into focus — those auto-curated collections that group standout photos by people, places, and occasions. For people who are already using Photos on mobile, the lean-back experience should be pretty familiar: sit down, sign in with a Google Account, and let the TV surface highlights without having to hunt through folders or albums. If you don’t trust the Stories engine, you can also disable Memories in Photos settings for slightly more control over what shows up.
Importantly, the first version won’t duplicate every feature of mobile. Think of it as the best bits of Photos but for your living room — curated, glanceable, and meant to be enjoyed with a remote. Samsung indicates that the release will be exclusive to its TVs for six months, suggesting it might become available on other TV platforms after that.
Closer integration with Samsung Vision AI
Later in the year, Google Photos will integrate with Samsung’s Vision AI, the company’s on-device artificial intelligence package that powers search, recommendations, and categorization of content. That integration will let you see photos appear in a more contextual way across Samsung’s interfaces, including surfaces like Daily+ and the Daily Board on 2026 models, turning the TV into a smart state of an ambient display when it’s not showing content or playing games.
The setup is meant to be simple: sign in, provide access, and have the system help populate set areas with new highlights and throwbacks of subjects.
“We want Photos to feel native to the TV, not like just another app you open and close.”
Creative tools and personalization on the agenda
As well as offerings for passive viewing, Samsung and Google want to introduce interactive features on the TV.
A new Create with AI mode contains themed templates, powered by Nano Banana technology and supported by Colour ABI, which enables fun effects, transformations, and fast projects without reaching for the smartphone. Remix allows you to alter the look of an image, and Photo to Video can knit stills into short, shareable clips.
Personalized Results will curate custom slideshows around a topic, location, or activity — collections like “ocean,” “hiking,” or “Paris.” These are built for lean-back fun, with your TV doing the grunt work of cobbling together context-aware reels from your cloud library.
What it means for users and the TV market
For families who are already storing years of snapshots and videos in Google Photos, a native TV app makes the transition friction-free. No need for juggling casting sessions or counting down the minutes until a screensaver activates; moments just happen where people are. It also brings Google closer to parity with competitors: Apple has long had a polished iCloud Photos app on the Apple TV, and Amazon’s Photos app is a mainstay on its Fire TV products.
The six-month exclusivity period epitomizes Samsung’s ambition to distinguish its premium tellies through software features and AI experiences, as well as panel tech. If that rollout lands as advertised — and works well at scale — other TV platforms will scramble to chase such Photos integrations and richer ambient modes. For now, the living room is Samsung and Google Photos’ property, if nothing else because the big screen has been put in a position that it was never quite ready for: you.
