You may have noticed a completely different screen the last time you tried to edit a photo on your mobile device. It has been rolling out over the last few weeks. If you don’t have it now, you will soon. It seems to be rolling out to Android first, but it is expected to come to iOS as well. Don’t worry, everything is still there (with just 2 notable exceptions) but they’ve moved things around and given us some cool A.I. tools.
Right on the opening screen are the 3 main suggestions, Enhance, Dynamic, and Boost. I always try the ‘Dynamic’ option. One click combines crop, rotate, color, and lighting enhancements to make your photo look its best. If perchance you don’t like what it did, just tap it again to turn it off. If you do like it – just Save. On Android devices it only offers to Save a Copy, meaning you now have a duplicate that you should probably delete. I find this a nuisance. I hope they change it.
Old Menu
Magic Editor button
Suggestions: Unblur, Dynamic, Enhance, Warm, Cool
Crop: Aspect ratio, Auto, rotate
Tools: Magic eraser, Unblur, Blur
Adjust: Brightness, Contrast, HDR, Tone, White point,
Highlights, Shadows, Black point, Saturation,
Warmth, Tint, Skin Tone, Blue tone, Pop, Vignette
Filters: 19 of them
Android – Markup: Pen, Highlighter, Text
iOS – Create
New Menu
Auto: Enhance, Dynamic, Boost
Actions: Crop, Magic Eraser, Unblur, Move, Portrait blur, Pop,
Sharpen, Denoise
Android – Markup: Pen, Highlighter, Text
Filters: Filters (21), Sky Styles
Lighting: Ultra HDR, Portrait light, Brightness, Tone,
Contrast, Black point, White point, Highlights,
Shadows, Vignette
Color: Saturation, Warmth, Tint, Skin tone, Blue tone
Search: tap the magnifying glass to search for an editing feature
Reorganizing
If you look closely at the 2 lists above, you should find all the same features, just in different categories.
- “Suggestions” is now “Auto”
- Crop and Tools are now combined under Actions
- Adjust is divided into Lighting and Color
- Crop and rotate is renamed as ‘Framing’
New features
- Search: Can’t find a feature? Just tap on the magnifying glass and type the name of the feature you’re looking for
- Reimagine is A.I. editing on an entirely new level for Google Photos. The ‘Reimagine’ option will show up after you circle a part of the photo on the very first screen of the editor. Just type words about how you want the photo changed.
- AutoFrame is more than just a new crop, it will automatically straighten photos and if it needs to it will use A.I. to create parts of an image for expanded portions.
More Videos
See also:
- 935.GP-Reimagine with Google Photos (how you can change your background to be the Great Wall of China, or make a whale jump outside your cruise cabin window, or … anything you can imagine!)
- 939.GP-Editing and Move (how the new A.I. features allow you to erase, move, or resize any object in your photo)
Missing
One feature that appears to be missing is the Magic Editor – that multicolor button to the left of the screen. It had the ability to move or resize objects in a photo. It also would sometimes offer to “stylize” a photo, changing the sky or the water. Move and resize is now on the Action menu, see the video 939 above. Stylize is not to be found anywhere. I hope they’re still working on that. I really liked the stylize, water, sky feature.
One other feature that is missing is what I call the 4-corner crop tool. Also known as “Perspective” where you can fix a distorted photo by dragging each corner separately. Also missing is Color Pop. As always, Google Photos is a work in progress and I expect these features may find their way back. If you have any issues with the new editor, now is the time to use the “Send Feedback” tool! You can see the official announcement of these changes here.
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Comments
7 responses to “2025 New Editor for Google Photos”
With the removal of the Transform (custom crop) tool for a 2nd time in 4 months, I’ll be migrating out of the Google ecosystem completely – I feel like Google has become fatuous and arrogant with their monopoly, as they won’t reply or attempt to explain their actions, locking and disabling replies to add insult to injury. They corrected the issue once, then undid the correction – again, with no explanation. Even Google 1 has no answer, just the usual shoulder-shrugging and referrals to the circular drain of locked Help topics and Community posts of frustrated users.
Don, I do expect the special crop tool to be restored but I certainly understand your frustration and not wanting to wait. I just don’t know that you’ll find any system that will be any better than Google Photos. Good luck to you.
The move and resize objects is now under Actions>Move. You can circle the item you want to edit and then move/resize..
Yes, I did say that. And I show move and resize on video 939. What is still missing is magic editor’s stylize. It is kind of covered in the new ‘Create’ Remix, but not quite the same.
Magic eraser or magic “editor” is not in the tools menu or any other menu. If it was intentionally removed, then say so, but misinformation should not be tolerated. I hear the app turned 10 years old. Congratulations. Did your student developers also turn 10 this year? Have a Happy Veterans Day. Thank them for their service to the greatest country on Earth. God bless America!
It seems like Google is following the, “Switch to AI by shoving it down users’ throats,” strategy.
The AI features are a joke. There is NO WAY to prompt what you want. Asked it to remove glare from a photo of a cross-stitch with reflections in the glass. The content was a a knight, a dragon, a castle, and words, “St. George slew the dragon.”
It removed the glare by inserting a cartoon picture of a fish. Tried 20 different prompts and, no matter what, got a different hallucination.
Please PLEASE, PLEASE! Use any influence you might have with the Google Photos product team to get them off the function deletion bandwagon.
😒a fish to remove the glare is pretty pathetic. I expect it will get there … someday. Meanwhile, if you have a Samsung – the Gallery app can remove reflections. See this tip: https://geeksontour.com/tips/samsung-gallery-can-remove-reflections/