Key Takeaways
- Google Photos now has a new flip option for mirroring images horizontally.
- The flip tool even works on videos.
- The flip option is currently only available in the mobile app, not on the web, rolling out gradually.
Google Photos is one of the best photo backup solutions for managing your ever-growing image library. It also packs powerful editing options, ensuring you don’t have to use a third-party app to modify your picture to get the desired results. Despite packing an impressive set of editing tools, Google Photos lacks one basic feature: the ability to flip or mirror an image. You can use AI to alter the sky’s color in your pictures, but there’s no tool to flip an image. Fortunately, this is no longer the case.
As many Google Photos users on Reddit report, the Google Photos crop tool now has a new Flip option. This option mirrors your image or flips it horizontally. Surprisingly, the Flip button also appears for videos. Once you flip an image or video, Google Photos will display the option to save it as a copy, ensuring the original picture remains untouched.
Until now, you could only crop, rotate, or adjust a picture’s aspect ratio using Google Photos. Flipping an image was the only basic option missing.
The option is particularly useful if you want to quickly flip a selfie and forgot to enable the mirror option on your phone’s camera app.
Sadly, Google is only rolling out the flip button in the mobile app of Google Photos. The option is not available on the web.
The new button seems to be rolling out via a server-side push from Google, so even after running the latest Google Photos build, you might not immediately gain access to it.
Google Photos editing suite needs more non-AI features
Google has been heavily focusing on adding new AI-powered features to Google Photos. While Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, and Portrait Light are impressive, the company must first focus on covering the basics.
Google Photos doesn’t offer the option to batch edit pictures or create custom presets to quickly apply across multiple images. Additionally, there’s no lasso tool for making targeted edits to specific areas of an image.
To Google’s credit, the AI tools it is rolling out are impressive. Recently, it released Ask Photos in Google Photos to select Labs users for an improved search experience.