For quite a while now, the Google Photos mobile apps (Android and iOS) have had more advanced editing tools than the web version of Google Photos at Photos.Google.com. See this video that shows some premium editing tools on the mobile app.
On June 12, 2023 Google Announced that some of these premium editing features are coming to the web version. In order to do that, they changed the layout of the editor on the Web version.
Things to know
- Everything from the old menu is still there, it just looks different.
- The premium editing features have a multicolored 1 beside them. This means that you must be a Google One Subscriber, paying at least $2/mo, in order to use those features.
- Not all the premium editing features have been added to the web version. For example, Magic Eraser is still only available on the iOS and Android mobile apps.
- This new Edit Menu is “rolling out”, if you don’t have it yet – you will.
If you notice the image above, you’ll see that the same options from the old menu are in the new one, just in a different order. Probably the biggest change is after you click on one of those menus. Options that used to be collapsed underneath a heading are now exposed in a long list.
It’s kind of ugly but I understand why they did it. Most people never even noticed the drop-down arrows so didn’t know that those options existed. For example, if you need to crop a photo so that it is a perfect square, that option existed in the old menu, but you needed to know about clicking the Aspect Ratio button to find it. Now, the new menu’s crop option opens up with all the possible aspect ratios listed.
Demonstration
In the following video I’ll show you one photo being edited in both the old system and the new one only using options that are available in both. Then I’ll show a different photo and edit with some of the new, premium options.