Google Photos takes a page from Snapseed with upcoming editor changes

The new UI emphasizes text over icons.

What you need to know

• Google is apparently redesigning the editor UI in Photos.
• The new design replaces the current icon-heavy UI with one that makes greater use of text.
• The redesign seems to be inspired by Snapseed.

Google is redesigning the editor UI in its Photos app, as discovered by app 'reverse engineer' Jane Manchun Wong. The new UI seems to take inspiration from Google-owned Snapseed, with an added emphasis on the use of text over icons. You can check out a few screenshots of the new UI below:

Google Photos is working on a new editor UI pic.twitter.com/GAK4NQCsIB

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) August 25, 2020

Taking a closer look, you can see that the previously text-less icons for cropping or adding filters to images are now replaced with text buttons like "Crop" and "Filters," with no additional icons. That's quite similar to another Google-owned imaging app, Snapseed, which also prefers the use of text over icons for its UI.

As someone who's had to explain where the crop button in Photos is more times than I can count, I, for one, welcome the change, which explicitly labels everything instead of asking users to figure out what each icon means.

Google hasn't yet said anything about the redesign, but as at least one Twitter user has discovered the new design on their Xiaomi Mi 10G, which suggests the company may have already started testing the UI in the wild. When, and if, it'll make its way to all users is, of course, anyone's guess.

The change follows an earlier redesign of the Photos app in June, featuring a redesigned logo, a new "Map view" and more.

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