The Google team made a quiet change to their service for storing and managing photos and videos. However, users took notice and made their disagreement known.
It is not about any function related to photography, but the protagonist of this change is the video editing. So if you like to create videos and movies from Google Photos, you will notice that one option has disappeared.
Google Photos no longer creates horizontal movies, so you can only create one of these vertical creations, regardless of the format of your videos. Maybe on mobile this is a change that can go unnoticed, but if you create Google Photos movies to watch on TV or share them on other services, you will notice the big difference.
Some users who noticed this dynamic thought it was a Google Photos bug. However, this time it was not a bug in the app, as David Lieb, product manager of Google Photos, clarified from his Twitter account.
Although they thought about adding an option for the user to choose the format, they decided to leave only the portrait mode. A decision that is causing a lot of discontent among users as can be seen in the Twitter thread after Lieb’s response.
They do not appear to plan to reverse this change, so users will have to turn to other applications to edit the videos in their own style. An extra effort that takes away the charm of the simplicity that Google Photos offers to create montages of videos and photos to turn them into movies with a few simple clicks.
