Keep a photo visible
while using other apps.

You're using your phone — checking messages, navigating somewhere, scrolling through work email — and you want to glance at a photo of someone you love without stopping what you're doing. Maybe it's your kid. Maybe it's your dog. Maybe it's a person you're missing.

Android doesn't make this easy by default. Photos live inside apps. You have to stop what you're doing, open the gallery, find the photo, look at it, then go back to what you were doing. That friction adds up. Most people just don't bother.

This guide covers every method for keeping a photo visible on your Android screen while using other apps — from the built-in options that kind of work, to the one that was actually built for this purpose.

Method 1: Lock screen widgets

Most Android phones let you add a photo to your lock screen. It's visible when your phone is locked — but the moment you unlock it and open another app, the photo disappears. This isn't really "keeping a photo visible while using other apps" — it's keeping a photo visible while not using your phone at all.

Useful as a wallpaper, not useful for ambient presence throughout your day. Skip this if you want the photo visible during real phone use.

Method 2: Picture-in-picture mode

Android's picture-in-picture (PiP) feature lets certain apps float a small window over others. It was designed for video calls and YouTube — not photo viewing. Most gallery apps don't support PiP at all. The ones that do show a small video thumbnail, not a still photo in a pleasing format.

You can test whether your gallery app supports PiP by opening a photo and pressing the home button. On most devices, nothing will happen — the gallery just goes to the background. PiP is not the answer here.

Method 3: Floating widget apps

There are generic floating widget apps on the Play Store that use Android's "display over other apps" permission to show content over other apps. Most are designed for notes or calculators, not photos. The photo display quality is typically poor, the UX requires manual setup each session, and most of these apps haven't been meaningfully updated in years.

They technically work but feel like workarounds, not solutions.

Method 4: Bubbles In Time

Bubbles In Time was built specifically to solve this problem. It uses Android's overlay permission to display your chosen photos as floating circular bubbles that persist over every app on your phone — not as a clunky widget, but as a gentle, draggable presence that surfaces throughout your day.

Here's how it works:

• Install the app and open it
• Grant the "display over other apps" permission once during onboarding
• Choose photos from your gallery
• Set how often you want bubbles to surface — every 30 minutes, hourly, or longer
• Go about your day. Photos will float up over whatever you're doing, stay for a moment, and can be dismissed with a swipe or tapped to expand

Unlike the other methods, BIT was designed from the ground up for this specific use case. The bubbles are circular, smooth, and designed to feel ambient rather than intrusive. They don't block what you're doing — they ride alongside it.

The phone wants your attention. This wants to give it back.

The display over other apps permission explained

Methods 3 and 4 both rely on a special Android permission called SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW — commonly labeled "display over other apps" in your settings. This permission allows an app to draw views that appear on top of all other apps.

You grant it once. After that, the app can show its content over any other app without needing to be in the foreground. Read our full guide to floating overlays on Android if you want to understand how this works technically and what other apps use it.

Which method is right for you?

If you want a photo visible on your lock screen only: use your phone's built-in lock screen photo feature. If you want a photo floating over everything you do throughout your day, responding to touch and surfacing on a schedule: try Bubbles In Time.

The other methods exist and technically work, but they weren't built for this. BIT was.