There are a lot of things that you can do to edit photos on the Google Photos app and service. However, videos have gotten the short end of the stick as you can do very little to the uploaded videos on the app. They barely have editing functions for videos and even the playback options are pretty limited. It looks like Google is trying to make up for it by rolling out some new features for the videos on Photos as you will soon be able to double-tap and pinch-to-zoom when viewing them on the app.
Android Police says that an update rolling out to some users, you will be able to double-tap and zoom on videos when you’re watching them on the Photos app. When you double-tap again, it will zoom out and bring you back to the regular view. This is pretty useful if you want to zoom in on some details of the video that you took and uploaded to the cloud photo/video service. You could of course do these to photos before so good that videos are joining the double-tapping party.
Maybe even more useful for some users is the ability to pinch to zoom and then pan around the zoomed video to zero in on a detail. This will of course work better on videos that are higher resolution so you will be able to see the thing you want to zoom in on in the first place. There’s a video in the source link that shows how you will be able to “interact” with the video showing off the pinch to zoom feature.
Hopefully, we get to see more video features on Google Photos like more editing tools aside from just rotating and trimming them. And with the service about to become not so unlimited anymore, we still have a few months more to continue uploading videos without it counting against our Google storage. It would be nice to be able to do something more with them rather than just play and view.
This Google Photos update seems to be a server-side switch and is not limited to a particular Google Photos version. So you’ll have to wait until you can double-tap and pinch-to-zoom away on your uploaded videos.
