Google Photos is the default gallery app on stock Android, and it packs several features to help manage and edit your memories. Recently, Google has been giving the Photos app plenty of attention in the form of new features such asauto-archiving for documentsandphoto stackswhich help manage your shots better. Now, it is making one-tap edits much more accessible in the Android app.
Google Photos has all the basic image editing tools one could ask for, such as color correction, straightening, rotation, cropping, etc. All of the company’s AI and ML trickery also shows up here in features like Magic Eraser,Photo Unblur, and more recently,Magic Editorfor the Pixel 8 series. As for video, the Photos app has options to stabilize footage, trim the duration, and apply filters. For more advanced image editing like curve adjustment, perspective correction, etc., you could use apurpose-built image editing suitelike Snapseed, another Google product.
That said, the presets and image editing tools in Photos suffice for quick changes. Options like Cool, Warm, Enhance and Dynamic apply adjustments with just one tap, helping photos stand out. However, they are buried in the editing UI of the Photos app accessed when you tap theEditbutton on an image. Now, Google is trying out new placement for these options in the bottom sheet which houses the Top Shot feature, EXIF data, location tag, and other options to share the image or set it as your device’s wallpaper.
On most of the devices we tested, swiping up on an image reveals this bottom sheet with the new previews for one-tap editing presets like Portrait, Dynamic, Color Pop, and Enhance. Placing these options here saves you the effort of tappingEditon an image and then selecting a suggested preset. A couple of taps saved may not seem like much, but the convenience adds up considering the presets themselves are a combination of multiple granular adjustments to parameters like contrast, brightness, saturation, etc.
The bottom sheet now shows suggested editing presets as well
Although the thumbnails for the presets don’t show your selected image, they still seem content-aware. If you swipe up on a picture of people, you will see thumbnails demonstrating the edits on a shot featuring people, but if you start with a naturescape, you will see a similar scenery in the thumbnails with a green hill and blue sky. Google also understands that the same edits don’t work on all types of photos. So, you will likely see Portrait, Dynamic, Color Pop, and Enhance suggested for shots with people in them, and Dynamic, Enhance, Cool, and Warm suggested for landscapes. There could be even more variations depending on your photos.
The new placement of the one-tap editing suggestions makes it much easier to make quick decisions if a photo needs post-processing. We would love the feature even more if it auto-saves the edited image as a copy or overwrites the original image, but for now, tapping one of the suggested edits in the bottom sheet opens the app’s editing UI, where you must tap theSavebutton after your edits.
The rollout of this feature seems to be well underway, albeit in a phased manner. So, it could take a few more days to show up in the Photos app on your devices.
Thanks:Eduardo, Nick, and Moshe
