Google Photos Movie Editor update rolling out

We've known since February that Google was planning to launch a new and improved Photo Editor, a great move to keep it in competition with iCloud Photos. While the earlier teases promised plenty of native photo and video editing features, the update has been rather slow in rolling out to Android devices. Lucky Android users who received the update a while ago have been cropping up here and there, but many people are only now getting their hands on it.

Android Life is one of them, and has let us in on the details of the new native artistic tool suite available for smartphone photographers. We now have cropping on both photos and videos, granular edits, and plenty of new filters. Naturally, you can play around with things like brightness, contrast, saturation, etc. and you also have skin tone and color controls, as well as adjustable tint, shadows, and a vignette filter. All this not only for photos, but entire videos, too! You can also crop and draw sketches or text atop the video, although it appears for the whole duration the video, and you can't make it appear on specific frames. 

In order to use the new editing features, Google Photos will require at least Android Version 8.0 and 3GB RAM in your phone, which shouldn't be an issue for most modern devices.

While iCloud Photos are the main go-to for Apple fans, being natively integrated into all Apple devices' camera roll (and allowing third-party apps easy access to your entire iCloud library), many users have been opting to use Google Photos as a back-up syncing storage option. While Google Photos lost some of its competitive edge over iCloud Photos this year, having done away with their free cloud storage plan (paid options now begin at $1.99/mo), this may be just the push needed to get users to keep using Google's photo service.

Google does still have a lot of ground to cover to catch up to iCloud Photos on desktop, as its app sadly lacks an offline mode. It does win in its family photo-sharing library function, however, which Apple still doesn't have. Its cloud-computed face recognition function is also still unmatched.