Google Photos Rolls Out New Video Editing Tools on iOS

Google has rolled out a suite of new video editing features for Google Photos on iOS that adds granular controls for editing things such as brightness, contrast, and exposure. In addition to the fine-tune controls, users will now have the ability to crop, change the perspective, and add filters to videos directly within the app.

In September, Google announced a redesigned editor for Google Photos that puts machine learning editing suggestions right in the center of the app UI alongside larger tabs to access editing controls directly. Google says this new redesigned experience will be available on iOS in "the coming months."

The new video editing tools themselves are already available on iOS according to Google thanks to a server-side roll-out, given the app was last updated more than two months ago. Google Photos remains a part of a handful of Google apps on the App Store that have gone for weeks without a proper update.

Google Photos was last updated in December and some have theorized that the lack of updates is due to Apple's new privacy "nutrition labels" that educates users on what data an app collects about them and whether it shares the data with 3rd parties. On December 8, Apple began requiring all app updates submitted to the App Store to include the labels and the absence of updates for Google apps seemingly suggests an unwillingness from Google to reveal its privacy practices.

Google said at the start of January that it would update its apps with the new privacy labels in the week following the statement, but so far many of its most popular apps such as Google Maps, Google Search, Google Meet, and Google Photos remain without an update or labels.