A Google Photos update that’s now rolling out widely includes an updated version of the app’s photo editing interface. Overall, it’s a good change, with tools rearranged to be more intuitive to find. But the update has also removed a niche but useful tool.
As noted by 9to5Google, a number of users on both Reddit and the official Google support forums have been reporting that Google Photos’ perspective correction tool has disappeared. I’ve gotten the photo editor update and can confirm I don’t have the tool anymore.
9to5 says perspective correction is still available in the previous interface. AP News Editor Dallas Thomas is still on the old version, and he also still has the tool.
Lacking perspective
The perspective correction tool in Google Photos was used for straightening out flat, square objects in photos; think a document on a table or a painting hanging on a wall. You could manually define the four corners of whichever object in the original image, then Photos would distort the entire photo to square up the area you defined.
It’s a niche tool, to be sure, but the removal will still be a loss for people who use Photos in certain ways. If you’ve been using your phone’s camera as a makeshift scanner and Google Photos to crop and straighten images of your digitized documents or printed photos, that’s no longer an option.
Google offers a PhotoScan app for digitizing printed photos into your online Google Photos library, though that app hasn’t been updated in a couple of years. For documents, the Google Drive app includes a camera scanning feature. The perspective correction tool in Google Photos presumably wasn’t used often, but even so, hopefully it comes back eventually.
