The Gallery app on your Samsung phone has a secret menu. Here’s how to find it

Samsung Gallery packs so many features, but not all of them are easy to find. You may be familiar with Audio Eraser, Generative Edit, the collage maker, and maybe even the built-in video editor. But besides those obvious ones, there’s a whole bunch of features that don’t show up anywhere inside the app, at least not by default.

They’re all tucked away inside a hidden menu called Gallery Labs, and the sad thing is, most Galaxy users have no idea it exists.

Gallery Labs is where Samsung hides experimental Gallery app features, and it’s absolutely worth digging into. But before you can do that, you’ll need to enable it first. Here’s how:

1. Open the Samsung Gallery app and tap the menu icon in the bottom-right corner.
2. Tap Settings.
3. Tap About Gallery.
4. Tap the version number 10 times in a row.

Once you see the “[Labs] Gallery Labs is enabled” message, you’re all set. Go back to the Gallery Settings menu and tap the new Gallery Labs entry. Here, you’ll see a long list of features divided into sections based on One UI versions – One UI 8.x, One UI 7.x, One UI 6.x, and so on.

Galaxy phones already have Secure Folder and Private Album for tucking away photos and videos you don’t want anyone to see. The problem is, both require you to move files manually, which means you have to keep doing it as new photos and videos are added. Gallery Labs has a feature called Album entry-locks that can save you from this hassle. It does exactly what you’d expect — lock specific albums with your lock-screen PIN or fingerprint.

All you have to do is select any album, tap the three-dot menu, and choose Lock album. A padlock icon will appear on the cover, and after that, you’ll have to authenticate every time you open that album. It’s convenient, but it’s not as safe as Secure Folder. This feature only locks photos and videos within the Gallery app. That means apps like My Files and Google Photos can still see those files just fine.

The biggest issue with Samsung Gallery’s slideshow feature is that it runs through every photo in an album. So if you just want to show someone a few specific photos, you’re stuck swiping through awkwardly or, worse, creating a new album with just those photos.

Gallery Labs has a fix for this: Slideshow with selected items. Once enabled, you can select the photos you want and go to More > Extended options > Start slideshow.

The “Create” menu in Samsung Gallery already lets you make GIFs, collages, and short movies. But there’s one more thing you can do with it. Enable the Save as PDF option inside Gallery Labs, and a new PDF option will show up in the Create menu. Tap it, pick whatever images you want, and the Gallery app will save them inside a PDF.

The PDF opens inside Samsung Notes, where you can annotate, reorder pages, or even save it as a note. It’s a clean way to document something without relying on third-party scanner apps.

By default, scrubbing through a video in Samsung Gallery means dragging your finger across the filmstrip view, which works, but it can take some getting used to. The Gallery Lab menu, thankfully, has a simpler option. Go to Video player mode on filmstrip inside Gallery Labs and choose Legacy video seekbar.

This swaps the filmstrip view for a proper seekbar with a play/pause button. It’s a small thing, but I personally find the seekbar better for jumping to a specific moment in a long video.

Unlike the main Pictures tab, Samsung Gallery simply dumps photos inside an album with no clear separation. And that’s a problem when you’re browsing the Camera or Screenshot album with thousands of images. You can sort items by date or name, but you’ll still have to scroll through a wall of photos.

The Timeline in album option fixes this. It groups images by date, just like the main Pictures tab does, which makes it far easier to find images by a specific day, month, or year.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but Samsung Gallery tends to play a preview of videos as you’re scrolling past them. More importantly, this doesn’t happen for every video, which is what I personally find more annoying than if it just did it consistently. You never quite know when one’s going to start playing. It’s also not great for battery life and scrolling speed, especially on older or budget Galaxy phones.

Disabling Video preview on picture list puts a stop to this. After this, the Gallery app only shows a static thumbnail instead of autoplaying a preview.

Exploring Gallery Labs feels a lot like diving into Android’s Developer Options menu. You come across all kinds of options — some technical, some niche, and some actually useful. It’s a bit odd that features like album locks and PDF creation are buried behind a secret menu, but at least they’re there, and I guess that’s all that matters.

The cool part about Gallery Labs is that it’s updated regularly, so it’s worth checking back every now and then. And if you’re worried about getting carried away and making far too many changes, there’s also the Clear settings changed in Labs option, which lets you undo everything in one go. Or you can just disable the Gallery Labs menu entirely, which has the same effect.

Gallery isn’t the only place Samsung hides this kind of stuff. You’ll find a similar menu inside Wi-Fi settings and even the My Files app. So yes, it’s worth checking those out too if you have a thing for exploring hidden features.