Google Photos will stabilise your videos now but it also adds distortion and warping

Google has updated its Google Photos app with a new trick up its sleeve. The latest version v2.13 of the app comes along with an option to stabilise your videos. This new feature comes months after the company added GIF editing , image stabilisation and concept based short movies last year.

The interesting part about the feature is that you don’t need to send it to cloud and the entire process takes place on your smartphone locally. To get started, you need to open Google Photos and locate the video, open the video in the app and tap on the pencil icon. Tapping on the pencil icon will give you the option to ‘Stabilise’ the video or rotate it. Tapping on ‘Stabilise’ will start the process and it will take a couple of seconds before the video is stabilised.

One thing to note here is that the app will save the stabilised video as a separate video file on your phone keeping the original video intact. The stabilisation itself is okay but it does introduce weird visual distortions and warping that makes it look like a scene straight out of Doctor Strange.

Google will hopefully improve the algorithms over time.