Google Photos prepares handy drawing tools, new account switcher

Ben Schoon | Oct 22 2019 - 7:10 am PT

Google Photos appears to be working on some handy new features. Discovered this week, a new drawing tool may be soon debuting in Google Photos alongside a new account switcher.

@wongmjane on Twitter discovered these new tidbits by enabling them manually. Since that’s the case, we don’t know when they’ll be available to the public through a full rollout. However, since these features seem to be actively working, it’s probably a safe bet to say they’ll arrive sooner rather than later.

The first of these two new features is a new account switcher. This one comes as little surprise, as Google has been slowly rolling out this style of switcher to the majority of its Android applications for the past few months. In a follow-up tweet, Wong also mentions that it supports the handy swipe gesture to switch between accounts that we’ve seen in apps like Gmail.

Google Photos is testing account switcher in the search bar pic.twitter.com/H8dzTO0LEH

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) October 21, 2019

More excitingly, Google Photos appears to be working on a new drawing interface to offer easy photo editing on the fly. This interface offers the user drawing tools, including a pen in seven different colors, a “highlighter,” and also a text caption creator.

Again, we’re not entirely sure when Google plans to debut these new drawing tools in Photos, but it’s certainly a welcome development. Notably, these tools appear pretty similar to the new “Markup” screenshot editor found in Android Pie and above.