Google Photos lets users back up their library of photos and videos to the cloud, and synchronise them across all their devices. Over the years, Google Photos has become a popular app on both Android and iOS. It does a great job of managing all the media on your devices and offers a bunch of useful features. Backed by Google’s machine learning algorithms, Google Photos makes it easier to organise your photos and videos.
On Wednesday, Google Photos’ product lead, David Lieb, used some of his downtime and asked users for some feedback about the app. While interacting with other users, Lieb also shared some insights on upcoming features on Google Photos.
He also acknowledged known bugs and talked about performance improvements while interacting with users for several hours on Twitter, as spotted by Android Police.
Hi Twitter! It’s no-meetings week at @googlephotos and I’ve got a couple hours free. Tell me what you want to see next from Google Photos! New features, bug fixes, performance improvements, you name it. (No promises but very open minds!)
— David Lieb (@dflieb) July 2, 2019
Here are all the new, useful features coming to Google Photos:
1. Ability to manually tag a face
Google Photos users will finally be able to manually tag faces on their photos. The feature is said to be in development, and there’s no clear timeline on when it’ll ship. Currently, Google Photos lets users remove wrongly tagged photos. The app won’t even let users pick photos for adding them to a tagged face.
2. Search for recently uploaded photos
There are a few features available on Google Photos for Web that haven’t migrated to mobile apps yet. But the Google Photos team is now working to bring some of those to Android and iOS apps. Users will soon be able to search for recently uploaded photos on Google Photos’ mobile apps. This feature is currently limited to the Web interface of Photos.
3. Editing timestamps
Another feature that’s coming to Google Photos is the ability to edit timestamps directly on the Android version of the app. The feature has been available to Web and iOS users for some time now.
4. Deleting photos
Google Photos’ team is also working on letting users delete some photos or videos from their library while they’re browsing albums. Users will also be able to tag a photo or video as a favourite within a shared album, apart from liking it.
5. Other notable features coming to Google Photos
Lieb also discussed a bunch of other features briefly during his Twitter interaction. These involved suggestions for feature requests such as easily removing duplicate photos and videos, adding a map functionality, displaying descriptions in slideshows, and more. These still seem like ideas being thrown around and most of these may not make it to the app anytime soon.
While Lieb spent hours talking about Google Photos, he didn’t give up any specific timelines for features that were discussed. It’s still pretty unclear when some or all of these features will arrive on Google Photos, but it’s interesting to see a product lead taking to Twitter to discuss a popular product openly.