YouTube has had it forever. VLC had it before most of us even owned smartphones. And yet somehow, Google Photos, an app made by the same company as YouTube, couldn’t let you change video playback speed. I genuinely don’t understand how that slipped through for this long.
But okay, it’s here now. And honestly? I think I’ll use it every single day.
The new playback speed option lives in the three-dot menu while you’re watching a video. Tap it, and you get a clean bottom sheet with five choices: 0.25x, 0.5x, 1x, 1.5x, and 2x. It is simple yet clean. Skimming a long family video at 2x speed or even slowing down a blurry action clip to actually see what happened, that alone makes this update worth getting excited about.
Now, the second thing, and this one’s more of a mixed bag for me personally.
A Pixel-exclusive AI Enhance feature, which is actually a one-tap button that uses AI to fix your bad photos, adjusting lighting and contrast instantly. You don’t even need to put in any manual editing efforts. Google is basically saying, “your memories deserve better than bad lighting,” and look, they’re not wrong.
The feature was originally limited to Google Pixel 8 and above devices, but it’s now expanding to all Android phones worldwide, as teased by Google Photos through their official X handle.
Here’s my honest take about these features, and I’m a little skeptical. Google itself admits the output will vary by device, which is a polite way of saying don’t expect miracles on a mid-range phone. AI photo fixes can go either way; sometimes they look gorgeous, sometimes they look like a painting filtered through a fever dream.
I’ll reserve judgment until I actually see it work consistently, which is hard to see since the results majorly depend on the AI processing.
Just like AI Enhance, the video playback speed controls are still in an early rollout, so if you don’t see it yet, updating Google Photos from the Play Store is your best bet.
Bottom line? The playback speed feature is an overdue win, no debate. The AI Enhance button has potential, but I’m keeping my expectations realistic until it proves itself on everyday hardware.
Google Photos is slowly becoming the media hub it always should’ve been. It’s about time.
