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You can now quickly rotate images in Google Photos with a keyboard shortcut

Photo - Google Photos 2016-06-07 10-18-35

If you — like me — have enabled auto-upload to Google Photos on pretty much all of your devices, you’ve surely noticed that some photos just don’t arrive on the site with the correct orientation sometimes. The Google Photos editor — which also has filters, brightness control, etc. — is an easy fix for this (it only take a few clicks), but now Google has made rotating photos in the app even easier with a quick keyboard shortcut that you can use when viewing any photo…

All you have to do is open Google Photos, click a photo that you want to rotate, and then press Shift+R on your keyboard. This will rotate the photo 90 degrees counter-clockwise, and will save the newly-rotated image automatically. That’s it.

This update comes just a couple weeks after another Google Photos web update, which added the ability for users to easily adjust the date and time of multiple images. Maybe I’m missing something, but it appears, at least for now, that this rotate shortcut only works with individual photos. Maybe Google will consider that an entire batch of photos could be uploaded in the wrong orientation and soon allow this to work in bulk as well.

In recent news, a teardown revealed that Google might be preparing to offer unlimited original quality photo and video backups for Nexus devices. Currently, users are given the option between “High quality” and “Original” when signing up, with the former being unlimited (but compressed) and the latter saving the full resolution photo to Google Photos while docking your Google Drive storage quota.

Here’s a quick look at some more Google Photos shortcuts:

Keyboard Shortcuts

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Avatar for Stephen Hall Stephen Hall

Stephen is Growth Director at 9to5. If you want to get in touch, follow me on Twitter. Or, email at stephen (at) 9to5mac (dot) com, or an encrypted email at hallstephenj (at) protonmail (dot) com.