Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
Pixel phones have been my primary camera for the past nine years. Ever since I picked up the Pixel 2 XL, I’ve fallen in love with the camera and everything it allowed me to shoot in an instant, no matter where I was or what I was doing. I didn’t have to plan ahead and carry my mirrorless cam and long-range zoom with me anymore, nor did I have to spend hours editing, stacking, and coloring photos to get the effect I wanted.
In 2024, I shot over 5000+ photos with my Pixel 8 and 9, and shared with you the best ones. I’m back in 2025, having carried my Pixel 9 Pro XL and 10 Pro XL through Paris, Budapest, Avignon, Rotterdam, Delft, The Hague, Mulhouse, Colmar, Bruges, Oostende, Athens, and beyond. I shot another 5000+ photos this year, and sifting through them was, once again, the most grueling end-of-year task. But I managed to pull through at the last minute and pick my absolute favorite snaps for this year.
So here are the 25 best photos I snapped in 2025. All of these were captured on my Pixel 9 Pro XL or Pixel 10 Pro XL, and none of them were altered in any way to edit colors, sharpness, or detail. No AI edits whatsoever, either. The only thing I’ve allowed myself to do is to rotate or crop a bit in order to better frame some shots since a lot of my photos are taken with the 2x, 5x, and 10x zoom, and it’s almost impossible to perfectly frame them when zooming in handheld mode. Enjoy!
If you want to see higher-resolution versions of all photos in this article (and more), you can find them in this Google Drive folder
The 25 best Pixel photos I shot in 2025 There’s always that one snap every year that I can’t forget, and in 2025, it’s this large panorama of Hadrian’s Library taken from the rooftop of Anglais Athens. I know it’s not perfect — there are garbage bins and cars on top, an abandoned skip on the right, and some framing issues and distortions that I would’ve fixed if I’d shot each frame and stitched it myself. But there’s something so… so “2000s website header” about this panorama, and the peppered bright green contrasting with the light stone everywhere makes me not want to take my eyes away. This is also a perfect example of the power of using the Pixel 10 Pro’s new panorama mode while zoomed in. I’ve shot some excellent 5x panos in 2025, and this comes on top.
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority Pixel 10 Pro XL panorama, 5x
The next two shots are all about perspective. One is snapped from the top of the Palais des Papes in Avignon, where I noticed that a small opening between the stones gave me a perfect view of the city hall bell tower. The impeccable alignment is what makes this shot sing, as do the subdued pastel colors. Next to it is a bit of a mind-bender — until you rotate your phone. I was walking from the Oostende train station towards the city center when I noticed that these two tall buildings were throwing a complete but very wavy reflection onto the water. I turned my Pixel, snapped the shot, and got this very sci-fi’esque skyscraper effect.
Every time I look at the photo of the stairs on the Roussillon’s Ochres trail below, I feel like someone ripped the photo in two halves and created a pixelation effect around the torn parts. It’s a bit uncanny. But that’s not the only thing I love about this. I found out about this quarry by mistake when I was nearby in Avignon, and joined a last-minute tour there. I’d never expected to see such a yellow-orange pigment quarry in France; it’s the kind of scenery I associate with the landscapes of Colorado, Arizona, or Australia. But what do you know? Southern France has some, too. As for the second photo, it’s from one of Bruges’ most famous bridges and canals. The bright, colorful flowers add to the quaint charm of the town, and make it into a gorgeous postal card-like shot.
Remember that last-minute tour to Roussillon? It also included a few stops in the lavender fields of the Luberon region, an opportunity I couldn’t pass up because we were there in mid-June, right when the flowers are all purple, and my husband absolutely adores lavender. What were the odds of us being again in France’s capital of lavender right during the bloom period? Close to none. So off we went. My entire photo album from that day is all purple, but there’s something about these two photos in particular that just clicks. The left one has that old-camera-film effect that I can’t explain, even though I didn’t apply any filter to it. The right one, with those perfect rows of lavender bushes, the Senanque Abbey in the background, and those muted colors with a hint of green and purple, speaks to my soul.
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