Google Photos getting a free feature update on Android – and it's coming to iPhone too

Google Photos is now 10 years old and has established itself as one of the best ways to manage images on your phone, not only backing up to Google’s cloud storage, but also being the gateway to Google’s image editing AI.

To celebrate its anniversary, Google is pushing out some updates to its photo gallery app and one of those will change the way that we all use it. That’s because there’s a change coming to Google Photos that draws the AI functions originally found in Magic Editor into the main editing section of the app.

Looking at the examples on Google’s blog post, it seems that some of the makeover will have some Material 3 Expressive cues too, with a slightly different aesthetic of Google Photos of the past.

To make changes you’ll now hit the Edit option and find you have options of “enhance”, “dynamic” and “AI Enhance”, making it easier to find all the tools. Google highlights options such as background blur, while AI can suggest edits for your images.

The editing side of Google Photos in this new format isn’t yet available but will be rolling out over the next months to both Android and iOS devices, so iPhone users can enjoy it too.

Celebrating a decade of memories with Google Photos - YouTube

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What else is coming to Google Photos?

Google is also adding a sharing function, so you can quickly generate a QR code for people to scan to get access to an album. It’s a great way to share an album, perhaps of a night out or holiday with friends, rather than manually adding people through the current sharing functions. This function is already available in my version of Google Photos.

Google Photos launched in 2015 and allows easy backup and syncing of images via a users’ Google account across Android devices – or anywhere that is signed into the app. That also includes Google Photos in the browser, a great way to access your images without sending them to yourself if you want to do some more serious editing.

As standard, Google accounts come with 15GB of cloud storage and Google Photos dips into that alongside things like your Gmail storage. Google has plenty of options to expand this rolled into its Google One scheme.

This will allow people to expand storage for a monthly fee, while Pixel owners have enjoyed various free offers over the years to get access to expanded storage. At higher levels the Google One account also provides access to Google’s latest AI offering, Gemini Live.