Since Google Photos split from Google+ back in 2015, users hoped the company would take the opportunity to make Photos more powerful alone than it could be while tied in to Google’s mostly failed social network.
To Google’s credit, the company has been working hard on bringing innovative new photo features to the service, as well as providing all users with free, unlimited photo backups, though at a lower quality.
Google Photos for Android has received another useful update, giving users the ability to create animated GIFs from a set of two to 50 photos from their library while offline. Before the update, users could select images and create an animation, but only with a network connection, presumably because the image processing was happening remotely on Google’s servers. Now though, even when you don’t have Wi-Fi, you’ll be able to quickly generate GIFs on the device itself, and they’ll be backed up automatically once you connect to a network.
This feature is Android-only for now, but Google Photos features are usually cross-platform, and iOS should presumably be getting the feature soon. Since releasing the Pixel, a phone with advanced automatic digital video stabilization, it’s clear the Google is getting serious about using the hardware to do more and more image processing locally on device.
[source]Android Authority[/source]
