Google Photos now has a subtle new but much needed feature

Whether you are an iOS or Android user, Google Photos is a great photo storage and sharing service with features such as Magic Editor and Ask Photos. However, one very basic feature was missing until this week — a photo flip option. 

First spotted by Android Police, users can now flip or mirror their photos from the Google Photos app. Although that may sound like a fundamental feature, the basic edit functions only allowed users to crop, rotate, or adjust a picture’s aspect ratio before this update. 

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Some helpful instances of mirroring an image include taking a selfie on an iPhone, which is automatically set to invert your selfie camera, keeping the real orientation of the photo. 

This is a personal pet peeve of mine because I generally want my selfies to look like what I see in the mirror. However, I can’t get myself to turn on the “mirror font camera” setting because, sometimes, having the actual orientation is better. 

Other helpful instances for mirroring an image include photography, adding balance and symmetry, or correcting orientation. Even if you can’t think of a use case now, it is nice to have the option where all your pictures are stored without downloading them back to your phone just to perform this basic function.

However, a more exciting feature in Google Photos is the “Ask Photos” feature. By leveraging AI, users can ask the chatbot to find a photo, instead of searching through thousands of photographs themselves. 

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For example, during the demo of the feature at Google I/O, instead of typing in the keyword “license plate” and scrolling through all of the photos themselves, users can now ask, “What is my license plate number?” Gemini will pull the number for them, using context to identify which car belongs to the user. 

The “Ask Photos” feature is strictly experimental for now and is available to select US users as part of Google Labs. If interested, you can join the waitlist by going to the Google Photos page, scrolling down to the Ask Photos section, entering your Gmail address, and clicking the “Join the waitlist” button.