There’s one consistent thing about Google Photos, and that’s that it’s always changing. Now it appears Google is reversing a years-old decision which will affect anyone using the app to play video.
Google Photos Logo
According to a report by the ever-vigilant Android Police, some Google Photos users are seeing ‘new’ navigation buttons appear when playing video recordings. When playing back a video, a pair of familiar left and right double-arrow icons allow users to skip backwards or forwards by ten second increments to locate their favorite moments (or ignore the boring bits).
Long-term users will recall that Google Photos already had these controls back in 2016, but they were since removed in order to make space for, actually nothing. Perhaps Google considered them unnecessary clutter. We’ll probably never know.
However, unsurprisingly for Google Photos, not everyone will see the new buttons.
In time-honored tradition, Google is initially testing this feature with a subset of users, so you may or may not see them on your own device when running the latest version of the app. Either Google has you on its list, or it doesn’t. There’s nothing you can do to enable the feature from your end.
Google Photos offers skip forward and skip back controls for video.
While genuine improvements are obviously welcome, unexpected changes, feature removals, and interfaces that vary from user to user are much less so. It can be particularly frustrating trying to talk someone through how to use a particular function, only to discover that they’re using an entirely different interface.
At least this time Google is putting something back rather than taking it away.
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