Google Photos gets ready to make one of its best tools you’re not using even better

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Are you really taking full advantage of everything Google Photos can do? Besides just being a convenient way to view all our pictures, or perform some basic edits , Photos is packed with some great tools you may not even know about. Today we’re taking a look at an upcoming change to one of those, plus a mysterious new tool we’re only just starting to learn about.

Over on the Create page in Google Photos, you’ll find the app’s collage tool — this handy feature lets you artistically combine multiple pics into one, perfect for sharing with friends, printing out, or posting to social media. We were already anticipating one big change here, with Photos getting ready to let you edit the appearance of borders in collages . While that one’s still not live, we’ve already got another in-progress tweak to add to our list, as Photos prepares to group collage options by themes.

You might remember when we spotted work on border options, we also saw the collages UI preparing a new button to view available templates. When that’s finally ready to deploy, it now appears that Photos will organize collage templates into the following categories:

Considering the alternative has just been scrolling through a lengthy carousel, breaking down the options into a handful of convenient groups like that makes a lot of sense, and we can’t wait to see Photos actually introduce it.

Finally, we have what could be an all-new tool being added to the suite of those already available in Photos:

Right now, we only have two things to go on: that name “Soba” and an icon that sure seems to imply an AI-powered video tool.

The problem is, it’s not yet even a little functional, and trying to access it just delivers an error message. We also already have a photo-to-video AI tool in Photos, so it’s not immediately obvious to us what Soba might offer to make itself distinct. Hopefully we can access it in at least a somewhat functional mode soon, so we’re able to start narrowing down what it actually does.