What you need to know
- The video playback experience in Google Photos is finally getting a much-needed upgrade.
- The ability to zoom and pan in videos is starting to roll out to users.
- It could take a while before the two new features become widely available.
Google Photos is currently the best photo backup solution available for Android users. It also offers a wide range of options for editing your photos. However, one area where the app doesn't impress is the video playback experience. Fortunately, a report from the folks over at Android Police suggests Google is finally rolling out new features that allow users to zoom and pin in videos.
The new double-tap and pinch-to-zoom features appear to be rolling out as a server-side switch currently, so it will take a few weeks before they start showing up for everyone. You cannot enable the new features just by updating to the latest version of the Google Photos app.
If you're one of the lucky ones to have received the new features, you'll notice that videos now fill the screen when you double-tap on them. To return to the regular zoomed out view, simply double-tap on the screen again. In case you want to focus on a specific area in the video, you can use pinch-to-zoom instead.
While these new features certainly improve the video experience, the app still lacks skip and rewind buttons. There are also no useful editing options for videos. You can only rotate or time videos in the Google Photos app currently.
