Google Photos update will improve your old Android snaps, but there’s a catch
Google Photos has long offered a 'Portrait blur' feature for adding bokeh to your people snaps, but now its Android app is bringing the effect to a lot more subjects –as long as you're a Pixel user or Google One subscriber. The editing tool currently lets you add background blur to existing photos of people. But Google has announced that its Google Photos Android app is bringing the effect to lots of new subjects, including pets, food and plants. The catch, though, is that you'll need to either use a Pixel phone or subscribe to Google One to get the feature. The latter differs from free Google Drive cloud storage by being a paid subscription offering, with prices starting at $2 / £1.59 / AU$2.49 per month or $20 / £15.99 / AU$24.99 annually (for 100GB storage). If you try to use the feature without a Google One subscription, you'll be unable to save the photo.
While it's unlikely to be a feature that you'll upgrade your cloud storage for, it is a welcome bonus to anyone who's in those Pixel or Google One camps. Photographers often use shallow depth-of-field, which this tool simulates digitally, to draw attention to a particular subject, and the ability to add it to old photos really broadens it appeal.
It's possible to do this already on other apps like Snapseed and After Focus, but there's a real convenience to having it inside Google Photos if you use the photo service regularly – and Google's subject recognition is improving quickly.
You may not have the feature on your Android phone yet, as Google says it's "coming soon", but expect to see it rolled out in the coming weeks.
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