20 things to try on your Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 has plenty of useful features that Samsung leaves for you to discover yourself. Some are buried in the Settings app, while others are available in apps you may already use every day.

We've put together 20 things worth trying, from making the wide screen easier to use to finding better ways to manage your photos and files.

A few require Good Lock and its add-ons, which you can download from the Galaxy Store or the Play Store. Before getting started, it's also worth updating Samsung's apps so you have their latest features.

Note: These features also work with the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra and other Fold models, but some of them may require your device to be on One UI 9 (Android 17).

Taking several photos of the same subject is easy. It's even necessary when you're, say, capturing pictures of your dog. But picking the best one later can be annoying, especially when the differences are small.

Samsung's Gallery Assistant app, part of the Good Lock suite, has a Compare images function that helps with this. You can select up to 20 photos and compare four at a time by zooming in on all four together or individually, making it easier to spot issues like blurry faces and closed eyes.

You can favorite the shots you like or delete unwanted ones while comparing them. The big inner display on the Fold 8 makes it easier to find differences between photos compared to a regular phone screen.

Install Gallery Assistant from the Galaxy Store, or from the Plugins section of the Good Lock app. You can also start comparing images in Gallery Assistant by selecting photos in Gallery and navigating to More > Edit with Gallery Assistant.

While you're in Gallery Assistant, here's another useful feature: Save as PDF. Have a bunch of screenshots or pictures, like booking confirmations or different pages from a document?

You can put them into one PDF instead of sending each image separately. Open Gallery Assistant, choose Save as PDF, then select the images you want to add.

You can adjust the page size, orientation, and image quality before saving the PDF file. You can also directly share the PDF instead of first saving it.

It's a handy way to keep related information together, particularly when you need to send it to someone else.

One more Gallery Assistant feature worth trying is Reduce size. It does what the name suggests: it lets you resize multiple files together — up to 500! — rather than opening and editing each one individually.

Choose Reduce size in Gallery Assistant, then select the files you want to resize. You can use the slider to adjust just how much smaller you want the files to be — you will get an estimate of what the new file size will be after the operation is complete.

You can resize videos as well, and Gallery Assistant will let you choose between the HEVC and H.264 video codecs depending on whether you want maximum space savings or the widest compatibility.

Reducing image and video size comes with a quality trade-off, so you may want to keep your originals if you think you might want them later.

The Fold 8's cover screen is short, but it's also quite wide. Depending on your hands, reaching every key with one thumb can still take some effort.

Try Samsung Keyboard's One-handed keyboard option. It makes the keyboard smaller and moves it toward one side of the screen. You can switch sides depending on which hand you're using.

Open the keyboard, tap the three-dot toolbar menu, and look for the one-handed keyboard button. You can also press and hold the button to move it into the toolbar for easier access.

If you don't see it, check for a Samsung Keyboard update in the Galaxy Store, as the one-handed option was added to the Fold 8 through an app update after launch.

Samsung Gallery uses a filmstrip of thumbnails for moving through videos. If you'd rather have a conventional seek bar, Samsung has hidden an option for that in Gallery Labs.

To unlock the menu, open Gallery > Settings > About Gallery and repeatedly tap the version number until you see a message saying Gallery Labs is enabled.

Go back to Gallery settings, open Gallery Labs, and select Video player mode on filmstrip > Legacy video seekbar.

You will now get a more familiar playback bar with play and pause controls. Try both styles and see which you prefer.

There's another setting worth checking before you leave Gallery Labs: Timeline in album.

The main Pictures tab already organizes your photos by date, but individual albums can feel like one long wall of thumbnails. That becomes a problem when your Camera or Screenshots album contains thousands of images.

Enable Timeline in album in Gallery Labs to add date sections inside albums as well. It's a small change, but it can make finding something from a particular day much easier.

The Fold 8's volume buttons can be awkward to reach when the phone is unfolded, especially if you use it in portrait orientation, which puts the volume buttons on the top of the device.

Samsung's One Hand Operation+ gives you another way to adjust the sound.

Install the app through Good Lock, enable a gesture handle, and assign gestures to Volume up and Volume down. For example, you could use long diagonal swipes so they don't interfere with your usual back gesture.

Once configured, you can adjust the volume with your thumb without changing your grip. Be sure to spend a little time adjusting the handle's position and sensitivity, especially if you find yourself triggering it accidentally.

Another Good Lock add-on worth trying is Keys Cafe, which lets you create your own Samsung Keyboard layout.

Open Keys Cafe and select Make your own keyboard, then choose a layout to customize. You can change the height and width of individual letter keys, move buttons around, and add extra rows for numbers, symbols, or other keys you use regularly.

For example, if you keep missing a particular letter, you can make that key bigger without enlarging the entire keyboard. Or you can add a row of frequently used symbols so you don't have to switch keyboard pages to find them.

Start with a few changes and try typing with them before adjusting anything else.

Watching a video gets annoying quickly when someone's lips move before you hear their voice.

If you notice this with your Bluetooth headphones, open Sound Assistant from Good Lock and look for Bluetooth metronome. Connect your headphones before starting.

The tool gives you a visual indicator and sound that you can use to adjust synchronization. It won't remove the physical delay of a Bluetooth connection or fix every playback problem, but it's worth trying before giving up on a particular pair of headphones.

Opening a home screen folder doesn't need to fill the Fold 8's big display with a handful of icons.

In Good Lock > Home Up > Home screen, enable Pop-up folder. Your folders will open in a smaller window; you can adjust the window's size and even control whether the folder opens in the center of the screen or not.

This is especially useful if you keep folders near the bottom of your home screen and would prefer their contents to remain easier to reach.

You may want the cover screen to turn off quickly while keeping the inner display turned on longer for reading something, but Samsung doesn't offer an option to set a different screen timeout for the two displays, at least not in general device settings.

However, you can use Samsung's Routines app to create a custom routine that handles that automatically. Open Settings > Modes and Routines > Routines, then create a routine with Folding status > Completely open as its “If” condition and Display > Screen timeout as the “Then” condition.

For the screen timeout, set a longer duration, such as five or ten minutes. Once you save the routine, your phone will automatically set the screen timeout to the selected duration when you unfold the inner screen and revert to the default setting when you use the cover screen.

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 remembers your screen rotation preference separately for the cover and inner displays.

But what if you want to keep auto rotate disabled on both screens while still having it enabled when you open certain apps, or vice versa?

That's something Routines can help with. Open Settings > Modes and Routines > Routines and tap the + button to create a new routine.

Under the “If” condition, select App opened and then choose all the apps for which you want auto rotate to be turned on or off. Under the “Then” condition, select Screen orientation > Auto rotate.

If you only want this routine to run on one of the two displays, you can add Folding status as another “If” condition in the same routine.

Samsung Notes is a useful PDF reader on the Fold 8, especially for long documents that would feel cramped on a smaller screen.

It also lets you bookmark individual pages, which is handy for manuals, study material, and documents you return to regularly.

Open a PDF in Samsung Notes, tap the Page sorter button, and use the bookmark symbol on the pages you want to save.

When you need them again, return to Page sorter, tap the three-dot More button, and select Bookmark to view just the bookmarked pages.

Sending a collection of files is easier when you can attach one archive instead of selecting everything again in another app.

Open My Files, select the files you want, and tap More > Compress. Give the archive a name and create the ZIP file; you can also add a password, split the archive into multiple parts if it's too large, or choose a different archive format. You can then share that archive through your preferred app.

Don't expect the size of the selected files to shrink dramatically after compression. The main benefit here is keeping a collection of files together in one attachment.

My Files can also connect to network storage, including a shared folder on a computer or a NAS.

Open My Files > Network storage > Add network storage, then enter the connection details for your configured share. The app may ask you to install Samsung's Network Storage add-on first.

Once connected, you can browse and copy files between the phone and that storage location. This is useful if you keep videos, photos, or work documents on a computer at home and want to access them from the Fold without uploading everything to cloud storage.

Samsung Browser has a few shortcuts that are easy to miss. You can swipe left or right across the address bar or bottom toolbar to switch between tabs without opening the tab overview.

There are useful long-press actions as well. Holding the Tabs button lets you open a new tab, while holding Back brings up the current tab's browsing history.

These are worth learning if you regularly jump between several websites. Once you're used to them, there's less tapping around to get back to a page you already had open.

Here's another Samsung Browser feature that can save some repetitive tapping.

On a webpage, touch and hold an image and look for Save all images on this page. You can then select the pictures you want and download them together.

It can be handy when collecting reference images or saving several wallpapers from the same page. However, keep in mind that the available images depend on how the website loads and displays them, so it won't necessarily find every picture on every page.

A notification arriving halfway through a screen recording can ruin an otherwise useful clip. Remembering to enable Do Not Disturb to hide notifications every time is another thing to think about.

Samsung's Nice Shot app can do it automatically. Install Nice Shot through Good Lock, open it, and enable Do not disturb during screen recording.

With this option, you can ensure that any clips you record of the screen for someone don't show any private notification pop-ups and prevent interruptions in general.

Galaxy AI can make you a new wallpaper if you're tired of the ones Samsung includes or don't want to use a photo from your Gallery.

Open Settings > Wallpaper and style > Change wallpapers and select Generative.

Choose a category, then tap the highlighted words in the description to change things like the subject, colors, or materials. Tap Generate and pick an image you like to use on your home or lock screen.

If the first results aren't to your liking, generate another batch or change a few words and try again.

The Fold 8's inner screen is wide, but it's also quite short in its default orientation. Some apps can feel as though they're wasting that space with oversized controls or thumbnails.

Samsung lets you adjust the zoom level separately for each app. YouTube is a good place to start, as a smaller setting can let you see more video recommendations at once.

Unfold the phone and go to Settings > Advanced features > Labs > App screen zoom. Select an app and try a smaller zoom level to fit more content on the screen.