Summary
- Google Photos is already modifying its under-development Quick Edit screen, first discovered last month.
- The revised version lets you disable the Quick Edit screen entirely, while the crop button from the previous implementation is now gone.
- There’s no timeline for the Quick Edit screen’s broader availability, but the wait shouldn’t be too long since it’s been in development for several weeks.
The Google Photos app for Android was testing a new Quick Edit screen last month to hasten the process of cropping or making other minor edits to the picture before sending it to your contacts. While it’s yet to become widely available, it looks like Google isn’t fully content with the design of this new screen, as the company is now making some additional tweaks to this yet-unreleased feature in the Photos app.
One of the major gripes with this new Quick Edit screen was that it adds an extra step to the process of sharing an image, particularly if you want to share it in its original form without making any edits. By contrast, the current stable version of the Photos app lets you open an image, press the share button, and immediately send it to a contact via the in-app share sheet.
A demo of the Quick Edit screen spotted last month (via Android Authority)
It looks like Google understands this added step may irritate some users, as the most recent version of the Photos app contains a modified version of this same screen, along with the option to disable the Quick Edit screen entirely. These changes were discovered as part of Android Authority’s APK teardown of the Google Photos app (version 7.14.0.718134140).
The crop button has vanished
The slightly modified Quick Edit screen
The screenshots provided by the publication reveal a much more streamlined interface within the Quick Edit page, with a pill-shaped button on the top right to “Turn off quick edit.” Meanwhile, the crop button at the bottom of the screen is gone, with the crop tool integrated directly into the image you intend to share.
The Original and Enhanced options are still present with the revised design, so not much has changed in that regard. Removing the crop icon and integrating the tool directly into the image makes sense, considering how most, if not all, social media apps provide a decent collection of editing tools, including a crop tool.
Users will also welcome the ability to remove the Quick Edit screen from the image-sharing process entirely. We presume it can be enabled again via the Photos app’s Settings. As you would expect, the Quick Edit screen with these changes (or the one we spotted in December) isn’t yet live in the Photos app. But considering how it has already gone through a revision, we suspect its rollout may not be far away.