HUGE UPDATE!

Almost a year after I wrote this editorial, I’m happy to report that Google Photos has been updated, and we see a HUGE improvement to processing times!

The rest of the app is still ugly and clumsy, but now it’s ugly, clumsy, and FASTER!!!

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Not the SERVICE Google Photos. The SERVICE is great. I’m talking about the Google Photos app.

Google Photos (the app) kinda sucks. Allow me to explain.

I’ve been digging into the iQOO 11, and performance testing the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. It’s really exciting to see the improvements coming to PREMIUM tier smartphones. These are much better behaved hot rod pocket computers.

I’ve added some new tests to my collection of benchmarks, and I’m tracking two different tests using Google Photos.

Google Photos is painful to use.

The core feature set is nicely laid out. I think a lot of folks appreciate the clean view of photos and videos that have been uploaded and backed up. Folders are well organized.

The new menus for editing and filters are nice, and it’s easy to NAVIGATE the app.

The real issues start when we try to USE some of these features for video.

I know what some folks are going to say, something about “avuraj cunzoomers don’t do video things on phones”, which is ludicrously silly to reply with. We live in a world where every social media site is trying to copy TikTok, and video editing apps garner hundreds of millions of downloads.

AVERAGE CONSUMERS SHOOT AND EDIT VIDEO FROM PHONES.

“Average” folks are perfectly comfortable cutting video, stitching clips together, adding filters and stickers, and even doing light chroma-keying to replace backgrounds. That’s “average” these days.

It seems only techies complain about this kind of workload on phones, because HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF USERS are really comfortable doing medium to advanced editing on mobile devices.

The Psychology of Editing Video

If you’ve been cutting video for a while, you know that “easy” things are more complicated than they seem.

“I want to cut off the end of this video.”

That’s an “easy” task. However, editors understand that you need a tool that can read a video file, make a note of where you want the video file to stop, then create a whole new video file based on that cut, and finish the new file off with as little reduction in quality to the original as possible. It’s a sophisticated dance of computing and software, but we want it to SEEM as easy as the consumer expects it to be.

“It should JUST WORK.”

For the consumer, they move a slider and their video gets shorter. They shouldn’t be exposed to the WHOLE process that happens behind the scenes.

This is where Google Photos drops the ball. Making these edits and saving these files is MUCH more difficult than it needs to be.

It’s easy to find the video you want to edit, and on pushing “Edit”, there’s a scanning process. The phone has to process SOMETHING before bringing the menus up. I wonder if the phone is creating a low resolution temporary proxy file.

On my Pixel 7 Pro, loading a SHORT clip (about 25 seconds long) can take 4-6 seconds, before I’m actually able to edit anything. The new iQOO 11 is more powerful, but that lag can still take 2-3 seconds just opening the file to edit. Editing a longer three minute clip, you can get stuck staring at this processing animation for as much as thirty seconds. Plenty of time for someone to decide it’s just not worth the effort.

The tools for color and filtering are well supported, but the real issues creep up on trimming a video file using the sliders in Photos.

They are terrible, slow, and imprecise.

When editing a video clip, Photos reduces your preview quality to a miserable, blocky, potato-grade view. There’s SIGNIFICANT lag moving the slider around on the video clip, and when you pause for a second, Photos TRIES to give you more precise editing by stretching out the preview frames. Unfortunately, this often makes your edit LESS precise. Photos wont zoom in on exactly where your finger is, it jumps several seconds before or after randomly, so the user needs to slide AGAIN to match up the handle with where they already were.

You have to slowly slide the handle on the video clip to get it to line up where you want it, looking at that terrible preview quality, and when you lift your finger off the handle, Photos will jump to a completely different frame.

You have ZERO TRUST that the phone has saved the place you WANT to cut, and it’s showing you a DIFFERENT section unrelated to your cut. This is the worst conveyance of task completion I’ve seen, maybe ever.

Once you’ve verified that the cut is placed correctly, then you push “Save”, and the performance is absolutely miserable saving the new file. It’s slow. There’s no progress meter. You just wait while a spinning icon loops around on your screen.

Everything about this process feels clumsy, and makes the phone FEEL like it’s struggling to do something which should be “easy”.

There’s no rhyme or reason that I can find for grading Photos performance. Some phones process video a little quicker in Photos, some phones struggle BAD.

My current test is taking a three minute UHD video clip, and trimming it down to two minutes in length and saving that as a new file. There’s no way to measure two minutes in Google Photos. I had to put a black frame in the project to find the two minute marker reliably. If you need to cut a video for a precise time limit on social media, Photos CAN NOT tell you the total length of the new video. You just have to guess.

Once I line up the cut for as close to two minutes as I can get, some phones can process this video SLIGHTLY faster than real time, many phones take LONGER than the clip would actually take to play in real time, and a few phones take SUBSTANTIALLY longer.

A Pixel 7 Pro takes two minutes and twenty seconds. It takes twenty seconds longer to finish the clip than it would take the clip to play. The new iQOO 11 can finish the clip in one minute forty three seconds, which is a little better, but it’s still so long, you start to wonder if the process is broken. A Sony XPERIA 1 IV takes a whopping FOUR MINUTES AND ELEVEN SECONDS to finish the same small edit.

There’s no way to know if Google Photos will run well on your phone until you try it, but even when it’s running “well” for Photos, it’s still a slow and miserable experience compared to third party editing apps.

By comparison, I’ve been testing LumaFusion a lot lately while it’s in public BETA, and the times are shockingly faster doing the same kind of edit.

LumaFusion gives the user better control over the clip, more precise control over where the edits will be, AND it renders the new clip significantly faster.

This unresponsive UI for Google Photos has been a long time issue with the App. You just never know if your phone will be blessed with reasonable performance.

One of the tests I tried running back at Pocketnow was timing the completion of Google Photos for stabilizing a video clip. Again, there’s just no rhyme or reason for why some phones perform better than others, and the whole process can take a long time to complete.

It SHOULD Just Work

It’s like hot ash in mouth to say (type) this, but this is one of the things an iPhone will do SO MUCH better than any of the most expensive Androids available.

When you edit a video in Apple Photos, the edit timeline comes up instantly. When you move the handles to trim a video, the app gives you a time code to a hundredth of a second to line up a more precise edit. When you press “Done”, you get the option to save a separate new video or replace the old video. Processing is significantly faster in Apple Photos than in Google Photos.

The whole process FEELS effortless. I have an easy task to complete, and it was easy to complete that task.

When folks complain about my critiques on content creation for mobile devices, I often get accused of “nitpicking”. I’m just “whining” about extremely niche computing workloads, and “avuraj” folks won’t care about poor performance for something they aren’t likely to do on THEIR phones.

Google Photos shows us numerous issues with EXACTLY the kinds of “low effort” edits people MIGHT want to do from their phones before sharing clips to social media.

If you put an iPhone SE in someone’s hands, the cheapest iPhone will deliver an effortless quick trim. Then if you put an EXPENSIVE premium Android in that same person’s hand and ask them to do the same edit, the process will feel miserably clumsy, and will take three or four times longer to finish (if not maybe longer if Google Photos really hates the phone you use).

It won’t matter that I can show the user third party apps which perform MUCH better. The app with GOOGLE in the title is terrible to use, and that will color the whole perception of Android vs iPhone.

The iPhone works.

It’s really a shame. I’ve gotten a number of my iPhone using family and friends to use Google Photos as a service for backing up images. The server side of Google Photos is terrific.

If you have a Pixel, the photo editing side of the app is also pretty good. We have fun tools like Magic Eraser, but increasingly more of the “fun stuff” is getting tucked behind a Google One pay wall.

Firing up an edit on my XPERIA, I don’t get the same fun Pixel tools. There’s VERY little point in editing a photo in Google Photos, and I regularly share photos over to Snapseed instead.

Google Photos on another Android phone is basically just a way to FIND an image that I want to edit in a different app.

It matters how a company presents their products, and consumers DO pay attention to these differences. Someone’s not going to sit down and measure all the differences in processing and performance, but they don’t really need to. Google Photos CLEARLY performs worse in every way, and it’s SO much slower, you don’t really need to time the app to understand that performance difference.

It’s one of my biggest hopes for 2023, that Google will take the app they put their name on and clean it up. There’s no reason why Android phones should FEEL this slow and clumsy anymore. We deserve better.