Google Photos offers a lot of neat editing tricks for your photos, and it includes a video editor as well – and it looks as though that editor is getting some much-needed and genuinely useful upgrades in the near future.
As spotted by Android Authority, hidden code inside the latest Google Photos app for Android points to a number of upgrades, and they're going to be particularly useful for people who aren't that familiar with the app's video-editing capabilities.
The biggest upgrade seems to be larger buttons with clear labels on them for the Mute, Enhance, and Stabilize functions. This makes it much more obvious what these buttons do – they're currently represented by smaller pictures, with no text.
You can get into the Google Photos video editor by opening up a video clip inside the app, then tapping on the Edit button. As well as the tweaks we've mentioned, it's possible to crop videos and add a variety of filters and effects.
More features coming soon
This analysis of the Android app also gives us another look at the upcoming playback-speed control feature, which has actually been spotted before: it's not live yet, but it will enable users to speed up or slow down videos.
It seems as though a 4x speed increase or decrease will be the limit of the feature, and it's going to be possible to apply the change to the whole video, or just to a specific part of it.
There's no indication here as to when the upgrade to Google Photos might go live, but it looks as though the bulk of the necessary code is now in place, so it shouldn't be too long before we see these changes on Android (and quite possibly iOS too).
As yet we haven't seen any sign of Google Gemini-generated AI images showing up inside the Google Photos app, though it does look as though we might soon be getting an easier method for hiding images of people we don't want to see.
