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All week was spent mourning the loss of Google+ and the inbox, two services that Google has finally chosen to close. I was a fan of both and, like other Google services who died before them, I will spend a good bit of time missing them. Of all the Google closures over the past year, this is the inbox that stings the most.
It was by far the most widely adopted and most popular Google app ever launched. Items like Google+, Allo and Spaces are all niche products that few people rely on every day. The inbox, one of a kind, was not only useful, but also enjoyable to use and has become the preferred way by which millions of users have learned to sort and manage their inboxes.
Although I can talk again and again about the virtues of the In-Dead inbox, Me and everyone else who uses it should simply accept the fact that it's time to move on. The ideal candidate for this transfer is Gmail, the other Google mail client and the one on which Inbox was based. Although not as fun to watch, Gmail offers many of the same features as Inbox, with the exception of the very useful Bundles. We hear that they arrive, however.
Yesterday, we showed you some ways to unclutter your Gmail inbox and bring back some of this zen inbox. But in this article, we have not really talked about one of the great benefits of Gmail when you work to unclutter your user interface: themes.
The themes in Gmail have been around for quite some time now, but with the addition of the Simplify Gmail extension we talked about yesterday, themes can move to the next level. I mean, just look at my inbox right now:
Now the general themes are excellent, but if you want to take it to the next level, you must be able to take advantage of your own photos. It used to be a much simpler task, but lately the way to use your own custom photos in Gmail themes was unclear.
For example, you could simply upload a photo directly from the theme selector. That's gone and in its place, you just have to choose from your Google Photos. This sounds pretty easy, but for some reason, my latest downloads refuse to show up. It does not matter what the photo is or when you download it: unless you do something very specific, you will not see it as an option.
To view a photo as an option for a Gmail theme, just go to Google Photos and add it to an album. As far as I'm concerned, I just created an album called "Gmail Themes" and added the images that I thought were good for my theme. Literally, as soon as I added them, I could access them via the Gmail theme selector.
It's a simple and crazy thing, but it's so unclear that it escaped me for weeks and I actually gave up trying to put together a custom theme. Thanks to the new cleanliness of my inbox thanks to Simplify Gmail, I've been reinvigorated to find a way to set up a custom theme. After searching and finding the answer, I thought that many of you would benefit from this knowledge, so here we are.
Go ahead now, and with a new, clean and streamlined Gmail inbox, create attractive and engaging inboxes that you can not wait to spend time with!
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