Google Photos gains a long-awaited video viewing feature

Google Photos has historically offered excellent photo editing tools, though it has been slow to incorporate similar advanced editing features for videos. This explains why it took until 2024 for the app's video editing interface to finally allow users to adjust the playback speed.

Now, Google Photos is announcing the rollout of a similar feature, but one designed for viewing your existing videos rather than for permanent edits. This feature was first discovered in mid-January, and after nearly four months, it has begun appearing on smartphones.

In a community post, the Google Photos team said this particular feature has been a "top request" from users for quite a while. The new Playback speed option appears directly within the three-dot menu while viewing the video. Tapping it opens a bottom sheet that lets you choose between 0.25X, 0.5X, 1X (default), 1.5X, and 2X.

The feature appears to be rolling out widely

Your choice is remembered only for that specific viewing session. This means Google Photos defaults to the original playback speed if you leave or exit the app and return to the video later. This is exactly how it's intended to work, as the feature is meant to be used solely while viewing videos.

You can permanently modify a video's playback speed by tapping the Edit button in the video player and finding the Speed option from the carousel, typically situated between Audio and Music.

I'm already seeing the freshly announced Playback speed option in the three-dot menu on my Pixel smartphone. If you don't have the same luck, try force-closing and reopening the app. It appears to be a server-side rollout, so you won't need to download or sideload a specific version of the app to find it.

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This may not seem like a major feature addition on the surface, but we're sure Google Photos has received enough requests for it to be incorporated into the video viewing experience. For now, this rollout appears to be limited to the Google Photos app on Android, with Google not specifying a rollout date for the web or iOS versions.

Separately, Google Photos is testing an image editing upgrade, according to a report from yesterday. As part of this upgrade, the image editor interface may return only one image result while using AI Enhance. Additionally, this feature may be split into two parts, though it's unclear what upgrades or functional changes they will bring.