Google Photos’ UI is moving in the wrong direction

Over the past 10 years, Google Photos has become deeply embedded in my life: I’ve got thousands of photos across dozens of albums, many of which I share with friends and family.

One of my favorite things about the service has been how easy it is to quickly make simple edits that’ll automatically apply across all my devices, a feature that’s made Photos a useful tool for me as a hobbyist photographer. Recent updates have brought some flashy new features to Google’s cloud photo service — but they’ve also made it a little less fit for my purposes.

Google, like so many other tech firms, has been on an AI tear for the past couple of years. The imperative hasn’t spared many corners of the Google software ecosystem. AI’s prominently featured in everything from Search to Sheets to Gmail — and Photos.

Photos isn’t necessarily a bad place to inject AI-powered features. In particular, I think Ask Photos has been great addition, leveraging AI to help users with extensive photo libraries find what they’re looking for without too much manual hunting. And though I’m not as likely to use it myself, Google’s Nano Banana image generation model is a fine addition for users who want to create AI-fueled remixes of scenes they’ve captured.

Where Google’s losing me is just how prominently it’s highlighting some of Photos’ AI tricks. I can look past the pop-up I saw a couple weeks ago prompting me to have Google’s generative AI turn my photos into cartoons. What’s harder to ignore is that Google has tucked manual editing tools, simple stuff like brightness and contrast sliders, deeper into the Photos UI to instead front a text field where I can tell Photos what I want to change about the photo so it’ll try to do it for me.

The text box is part of an Ask Photos-branded feature Google calls Help me edit, which debuted on the Pixel 10 series this summer and has been making its way to other Android phones over the past couple of months. Help me edit can handle simple editing tasks (making a photo brighter or darker, or converting it to black and white) as well as more complex AI-powered tweaks. You can use it to add and remove objects from images, change people’s facial expressions, or replace a gloomy sky with a sunny one.

Now, on my Pixel 9 Pro, Help me edit is the first tool I see when I tap Edit on an image in Photos. The Help me edit box is prominently placed under the photo you’re working with, right within thumb’s reach. Cropping and rotating options are easily accessible in this editing view, but the tools I need most often — manual control over image aspects like black levels and warmth — have been pushed deeper into the app interface.

Prior to this latest redesign, if I wanted to make an image a little warmer in Photos (correcting for a key Pixel 9 Pro camera processing weakness), I’d tap Edit, scroll over to Adjust, choose Warmth from the carousel of options, then make the edit I wanted to see. Now, it’s Edit, Tools, scroll and pick Color, scroll to Warmth, then tweak.

It’s a relatively small change to my workflow — but for me, it’s a change in the wrong direction. I’d like to see Photos make manual editing tools easier to access and use, rather than push them further from the surface to highlight Google’s AI tech.

I’m not trying to wade into what’s a photo territory here; the genie’s out of the bottle with this type of AI image manipulation, and Google’s been experimenting with it in Photos for quite some time. Plus, Help me edit finally lets you erase fences from the foreground of your photos, functionality Google’s been teasing for years. Help me edit can yield impressive results, but it’s just not the type of feature that I want out of Photos.

Over the years, Photos has become a part of the digital infrastructure of my life, and it’s far too ingrained for me to be looking for alternatives over this AI-centric editing interface makeover. I have to think plenty of other users are in the same boat. In this economic environment, we can expect Google to keep nudging features like these closer to the surface of all its products. I just hope the features I actually want to use don’t end up overlooked because of it.