What you need to know
- Google Photos could soon pick up a much-needed facelift for its editor interface.
- A few images have surfaced on Telegram that suggest the app's editor layout will match large-screen devices.
- It appears to be under development at this moment, and Google is supposed to announce it in the near future.
The Google Photos app could soon get a proper editor layout that matches large screens. A handful of images that surfaced on Telegram indicate that the app's editing interface may make better use of the big screen real estate on tablets and foldable phones.
According to a post on the Google News Telegram channel, the photo editing and storage service "will be optimized for tablets in landscape mode." This means that the portrait mode remains unchanged, with editing sliders appearing below a given photo.
Meanwhile, the post notes that the new layout will divide the screen into side-by-side sections with a preview of your image on the left and editing tools to the right. This will make editing photos on larger screens easier because you'll have more space to work with and can make more precise edits.
Currently, Photos' editor on tablets looks like a stretched-out version of its smartphone counterpart, unlike many of the best photo editing apps. This results in a less-than-ideal user experience, as the app can be difficult to use and navigate on a big screen. That said, some of the app's interfaces already provide a consistent user experience across different devices.
Google Photos is primarily designed for use on smartphones, where most of the app's functionality is optimized for vertical scrolling and a narrower aspect ratio. On tablets, the user interface wastes so much space, as it is not fully optimized for the larger screens.
The new layout will be a welcome improvement for Photos' editor interface, although there's no official word yet on its availability. It doesn't seem to be live for everyone just yet, and it was only enabled in the latest version of the Photos app.
We hope to hear more about this update at Google's I/O event, where Google will presumably unveil its first foldable phone and the Pixel Tablet.
