Google Photos adds video editor, puts Pixel exclusive features behind a paywall

Google Photos currently ships on most Android phones and serves as a useful backup tool where unlimited photos can be stored at high resolution. While that ‘unlimited’ part will be changing this July except for 2016 Pixel user, Photos remains a useful image editing tool that’s just sitting there in your phone’s app drawer.

For those who do use Google Photos to edit your images - there’s good news. Google unveiled a new set of tools within the Google Photos app to edit videos, much the same way you’d edit images in the app. Google said in a blog post announcing the feature, that iOS devices would be the first to receive the feature rolling out today, while Android devices will get it “in the coming weeks.”

Also read: Google Photos now gets a pinch-to-zoom feature for videos

In an animated graphic of the video editor in action (shown below) Google shows how the interface looks nearly the same as the Photos editor for images. If the interface is anything to go by, the video editing tools should be just as easy to use as their image editing counterparts. Google said its redesigned editor for images will roll out to iOS devices in the coming months.

Google also mentioned that it was bringing Blur and Colour Pop - two Pixel exclusive features which were previously part of the Google Photos image editor to non-Pixel users, but there’s a catch. Blur and Colour Pop would previously work on all devices when editing a photo captured with depth information - a real portrait image. The Pixel exclusive feature was using those machine learning effects on regular, photos, like the ones you scan from old albums.

Starting today, Google says that these features will also work on non Pixel devices, but if you want to use Colour Pop and Blur on those old or plain images without depth information, you’re going to have to shell out money for Google One. The company says that both features will be behind a paywall.

Read more: Google Photos gets updated for tablet users

“Google One members will have access to other new machine learning-powered effects, too. Think of these as super filters that apply complex edits with just one tap,” Google states. Plans for Google One start at ₹130 a month or ₹1,300 a year for 100 GB of storage, with other features and benefits - but you’ll still need a device with at least Android Oreo and 3 GB RAM in order to use the feature, the company said.