Google Photos Gets New AI-Powered Image Editing Tools

[MacRumors]

Google is updating the Google Photos app with a redesigned AI-powered editor that's designed to simplify photo editing. The updated editing tool provides AI suggestions to combine multiple effects for quick but eye-catching edits, plus it has a feature for tapping into specific parts of an image to get specific editing tips.

The updated interface will feature AI tools like Reimagine and Auto frame alongside standard controls like brightness and contrast. The updated editor in Google Photos is rolling out to Android users first, but Google plans to bring it to iOS users later this year.

Google is also making it easier to share albums from Google Photos with others, by allowing users to generate a QR code for an album. The QR code can be shared with people nearby, printed for group events, or sent digitally. Anyone with the QR code can view or add photos to an album.

The new features are coming in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Google Photos. Since it launched in 2015, Google Photos has become one of the most popular photo storage options. Google says that more than 1.5 billion people use Google Photos each month, with more than nine trillion photos and videos stored.

Article Link: Google Photos Gets New AI-Powered Image Editing Tools

 

[Sheepish-Lord]

The ad artificially adding leaves to the ground makes no sense…it’s a fake memory and didn’t happen. Im all about editing photos to remove things like power lines but changing big aspects is just wrong.

 

[jeremz1ne]

i really like that

 

[filmantopia]

The ad artificially adding leaves to the ground makes no sense…it’s a fake memory and didn’t happen. Im all about editing photos to remove things like power lines but changing big aspects is just wrong.

Totally agree. What's the point of sharing a fake world with each other, and passing it off as real?

 

[DocMultimedia]

I'm a fan of Google photos, but they need drastic improvements to how things are shared. If they took the full album approach of Flickr they'd really crush everyone else.

In any case, they'll have my monthly payment until I pass away.

Edit: I really like the ad.

 

[svish]

Will try it out once the iOS app is released. Meanwhile hoping to see improved photo editing tools on iOS

 

[Jumpthesnark]

Erasing things and people who were really there, changing the sky to a perfect clear blue, adding a field of flowers or a pile of autumn leaves that weren't there... and of course make it look like people are 5 years younger and 10 lbs lighter, etc., etc., etc. What value does a photo have it's not real?

I would love social media platforms to develop filters that give people the ability to not see faked AI images if they want.

 

[nfl46]

It’s still crazy to me that Apple doesn’t just update their Photos, Contacts, etc apps in the App Store.

 

[211]

The Photos Mac app is cumbersome to deal with. It cannot do a lot of things you’d think it should be easy to do, especially if you need to change multiple photos at once, editing, metadata, finding duplicates, etc. This is where Apple Intelligence would have been useful, not Image Playground

 

[winxmac]

It’s still crazy to me that Apple doesn’t just update their Photos, Contacts, etc apps in the App Store.

One area that you would say android is better than iOS, being able to update the app without waiting for a system update.

 

[jbrons]

I still miss Picasa and am salty they killed it off for this.

 

[@Brett]

InstaAI. When does a memory no longer stay a memory if you can alter everything.

 

[ronno]

People been using photo editors, such as Photoshop to change pictures for eons, so why don’t y’all settle down.
Looks handy to me.

 

[contacos]

Totally agree. What's the point of sharing a fake world with each other, and passing it off as real?

Have you meat influencers?

 

[Jarman74]

Here's hoping that a feature for finding duplicates gets baked in. At last.

 

[MacBH928]

yes yes, upload your personal images to our servers, its good for you... (and for Veo)

 

[Piggie]

Totally agree. What's the point of sharing a fake world with each other, and passing it off as real?

Indeed.
I mean the next thing you know we'll have women purchasing coloured paints and powders to put all over their face in order to fool others into thinking they look a particular way.
We don't want such fake things to start happening in the world

 

[cjsuk]

The ad artificially adding leaves to the ground makes no sense…it’s a fake memory and didn’t happen. Im all about editing photos to remove things like power lines but changing big aspects is just wrong.

I agree entirely with this. It's mostly playing into the usually dishonest portrayal of your life that appears on social media. The desperate effort to present things how you want them to be perceived rather than how they are. It's fakery.

Recently I was unfortunate enough to have decided to go for a day hike somewhere which featured on TikTok without realising it. This ended in wading through piles of people taking the same photo over and over again, replicating what was shown on TikTok. Whilst sitting on a wall, a friend and me looked at what people were posting on Instagram. Well lots of heavily edited stuff which had people removed all the other people from it. Urgh.

I figured I'd preserve some reality. At least these folk didn't give up on the first hill (oh hikes are harder than they look on tiktok when you eat KFC, watch netflix and vape all day - who'd have thought it?).

In some places I've been such as Sorrento and Santorini, there are literally queues to take the same photo/selfie which will no doubt have anything remotely human edited out to make it look sanitised.

Even worse, all this does is make everything look uniform. This is then used to train more models which generate more crap and eventually all signal and art degrades into a fuzzy mush of beige, soulless crap.

 

[Jumpthesnark]

People been using photo editors, such as Photoshop to change pictures for eons, so why don’t y’all settle down.
Looks handy to me.

People have been using post processing tools such as Photoshop for years. "Editing photos" is a term that has been around for generations, and it means selecting images for publication. This usage predates the term's usage as related to rasterized digital images. People who have no idea what editing is only relatively recently started to refer to digital alteration of a photo as "editing," using software tools, instagram filters to make eyes bigger or to add a puppy dog snout, etc.

That horse has left the barn, of course. Language changes over time, and people are going to call post processing "editing" forever. That's fine. But that doesn't mean Photoshop is an editing tool in the classic sense. It is not. It is a post-processing and creative tool, and has been since it was created. Different tools are used for editing - Adobe makes some, as do others.

But to your point, people have been manipulating digital images for a while, and all it has done is lessen our belief that an image we're looking at might be a truthful depiction of what existed when the photographer pressed the button.

EDIT for clarity, added final graf

 

[uacd]

Google being Google.
So, they want to erase reality for us to live in virtual reality?
Sounds dystopian to me.

But to be honest, these tools were available for ages in Lightroom and Photoshop, without any AI baggage. I had magic eraser in Pixelmator for ages and Apple have acquired the company, but their Apple Intelligence eraser often works slower than Pixelmator’s one, and that is on a 16 Pro!

But why fake an image if you can capture a better one? Sure it needs skills, what doesn’t? Maybe if your photo is too bad it is better be deleted and retaken again?

People in shots? Zoom!
Blurry shots? Learn your focus/AF speed!
Want a better sky? Disable HDR or chose the other day, or work with image filters!

These are only some advices to keep image free of unnecessary AI processing. After all their data centers are using so much power for such useless stuff like photo manipulation, keeps me worried about our planet’s future…

 

[hagar]

Meanwhile, the Apple Photos app has become unusable due to a mangled user interface with all the buttons removed. I hate it with a vengeance.

And if I want to remove objects from a photo, I need to download 7Gb and change the language of my phone, Siri and all the HomePods in my house to a supported language so I can enable AI. Who decides this stuff?????

 

[Kottu]

I usually avoid adding extra objects or scenes to the photos I take. However, I sometimes remove distracting elements to make the image more appealing. On my train ride home from work, I took a couple of photos and tried editing them. Google did an impressive job with just one click—no need to draw lines or deal with the messiness like in the Photos app. Take a look at both pictures and see if you can guess which one was edited by Google and which by Apple.

 

[cjsuk]

I usually avoid adding extra objects or scenes to the photos I take. However, I sometimes remove distracting elements to make the image more appealing. On my train ride home from work, I took a couple of photos and tried editing them. Google did an impressive job with just one click—no need to draw lines or deal with the messiness like in the Photos app. Take a look at both pictures and see if you can guess which one was edited by Google and which by Apple.

They both look like they did a terrible job. One more terrible than the other.

On the better one there are artifacts everywhere and there is still a vertical column or pole in the tree.

The old rule applies: most of the work when taking a photo happens before you press the shutter.

 

[tomtad]

Meanwhile Apple...

 

[Kottu]

They both look like they did a terrible job. One more terrible than the other.

On the better one there are artifacts everywhere and there is still a vertical column or pole in the tree.

The old rule applies: most of the work when taking a photo happens before you press the shutter.

I do agree that Google doesn’t do a perfect job either but from the beginning when google started with Magic eraser, they were doing a better job than Apple does now. I don’t understand why Apple released this feature before they were ready with it.