Google Photos could limit Pixel-exclusive AI editing features for your own good

Owning a Pixel device comes with perks, including exclusive features that other Android devices lack. One such exclusive feature (or rather, a set of features) is available in Google Photos’ image editor, offering extras such as Help Me Edit and AI-powered filters to improve photos with minimal input. And with an upcoming update, Google Photos may get more options like these, adding more flavor to your photo editing.

The Pixel-exclusive AI Enhance feature in Google Photos is getting buffed up. Currently, when you apply AI Enhance on a photo, the editor automatically crops and changes the composition of the picture, or fixes colors or lighting, to make the image look more appealing. Once finishes, the feature gives you three results to choose from.

Now, Google appears to be working on another version of AI Enhance that will produce only one picture instead of three options. Although the exact reason is unclear, it could help avoid choice fatigue among users and also reduce compute requirements at Google’s end. While it could also be seen as a way to save time, we didn’t notice that single-image generation was faster than when Google Photos makes three.

Google has also renamed the existing option as “AI Enhance II,” while the newer option is called “AI Enhance I.”

The split AI Enhance function is already being tested with a small set of users. One of them is Telegram user @y7kka, who first tipped us off to the change. However, it doesn’t seem to be out widely yet, and we don’t have access to the feature.

However, we were able to reverse-engineer version 7.69.0.890655694 of the Google Photos app to enable it and to show you the interface changes. Apart from the number of photos generated, we didn’t see any significant differences between the results of AI Enhance I and AI Enhance II.

We hope Google will share some insights into the reason for its decision when it rolls out the editing feature more widely.