Taylor Kerns / Android Authority
Over the past 10 years, Google Photos has become deeply embedded in my life: I’ve got thousands of photos across dozens of albums, many of which I share with friends and family.
One of my favorite things about the service has been how easy it is to quickly make simple edits that’ll automatically apply across all my devices, a feature that’s made Photos a useful tool for me as a hobbyist photographer. Recent updates have brought some flashy new features to Google’s cloud photo service — but they’ve also made it a little less fit for my purposes.
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Part of a bigger picture
Ryan Haines / Android Authority
Google, like so many other tech firms, has been on an AI tear for the past couple of years. The imperative hasn’t spared many corners of the Google software ecosystem. AI’s prominently featured in everything from Search to Sheets to Gmail — and Photos.
Photos isn’t necessarily a bad place to inject AI-powered features. In particular, I think Ask Photos has been great addition, leveraging AI to help users with extensive photo libraries find what they’re looking for without too much manual hunting. And though I’m not as likely to use it myself, Google’s Nano Banana image generation model is a fine addition for users who want to create AI-fueled remixes of scenes they’ve captured.
Where Google’s losing me is just how prominently it’s highlighting some of Photos’ AI tricks. I can look past the pop-up I saw a couple weeks ago prompting me to have Google’s generative AI turn my photos into cartoons. What’s harder to ignore is that Google has tucked manual editing tools, simple stuff like brightness and contrast sliders, deeper into the Photos UI to instead front a text field where I can tell Photos what I want to change about the photo so it’ll try to do it for me.
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