Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
Change isn’t always easy, and while sometimes we resist it for as long as we can, dealing with it is more often than not an inevitability. Though our attitudes may sometimes gravitate more towards acceptance than full-on embracing that change, swallowing that pill can be a lot easier if we feel reassured that we’re moving in a positive direction — that we’re at least going to get some benefit from the change.
Right now, Google Photos is going through some growing pains: a moment of temporary upheaval — and we really are trying to emphasize there, “temporary” — as the app introduces a rejiggered approach to its editing suite that has a lot of users feeling somewhere between confused, frustrated, and angry.
Why did Google change my Photos editor? Let’s back up for a second. Google Photos first debuted back in 2015, emerging from the rubble of Google+, and while celebrating its 10th birthday this year, Google announced a few upcoming changes. Those included that updated QR code scanner as well as a new editor experience that “provides helpful suggestions and puts all our powerful editing tools in one place.”
While Google did mention a few concrete changes, like being able to tap on part of an image to get editing suggestions, the full scope of the reorganization wasn’t immediately clear. And while Google missed its initial June release timetable for distributing the update, that also didn’t sound like a bad thing, with Google talking seriously about how much it wanted to get this refresh right: This is a major redesign for our editor — providing all new helpful suggestions and bringing all our powerful editing tools together in one place — so we are taking our time rolling it out and making sure that it is working well for users before bringing it to everyone. This week, on the cusp of August, the new editor has finally started rolling out widely. Did that extra time pay off? Based on the reactions we’re hearing from users, Google may have wanted to keep testing some of these tweaks just a little bit longer.
Worse, or just different? Pull up the new Google Photos on your Android device, and it’s going to look reasonably similar to what we had just earlier this week. And even when you tap on that “Edit” button, it’s still clear this is very much the Google Photos editor, even as our editing options present themselves in a quite different way.
Old UI New UI
Maybe the first thing you’ll notice is the persistent cropping interface. While you could tap on an edge to immediately begin cropping in the old UI, here you’re more or less always in cropping mode, which Google makes practical by parking those crop options up above your image.
Old UI New UI
That’s a big change already, but one that’s not too hard to get behind. What’s more frustrating is that this shift seems to have resulted in us losing the ability to perform perspective correction while cropping — if that option is hiding somewhere in the new UI, we haven’t spotted it yet. Hopefully that’s not a permanent oversight, as this was a quite useful tool we’d love to have back.
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