Google Chrome’s native screenshot editing tool is being scrapped

Remember that “screenshot editing tool” that Chrome was discussing a year ago? We covered it right when we caught wind of it. Its purpose was to quickly crop and share captures on desktops where one may or may not have native or third-party editing software. Ideally, a Chrome user could do everything they needed to do across their browsing experience without the need for other apps, but it looks like that’s no longer going to be the case.

As discovered by Leopeva64 on Twitter, Chrome’s development team seems to have changed its mind about the tool entirely thanks to a load of UX feedback. Apparently, it isn’t quite where it needs to be and will require a ton of work to get it to be viable for users, so instead, development is halting entirely.

We decided, after a great deal of UX feedback, that this component isn’t polished enough to ship and we don’t quite see a path to getting it there without a big rework. This change deletes the feature, the logic to install the component, and the wiring for it in the screenshot bubble.

For the time being, you can take the feature for a spin by enabling the “Sharing Desktop Screenshots” and “Sharing Desktop Screenshots Edit” developer flags in Chrome. Once these are both scrapped as the editor is spun down, they will, of course, disappear forever. Well, I suppose such a vital tool will eventually crop back up as Google tries to find another way to implement it in the future, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Chromebook users already have a way to edit screenshots since this is natively baked into the operating system, and Windows and Mac users likely already rely on Photoshop, Paint or something else, so most users likely won’t be too broken up about this right now.