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Last July, Google announced that the Google Photos app on Chromebooks would add a new tool that would allow users to create movies directly from the Photos app. The update was supposed to arrive last fall but that didn’t happen. A few months removed and we’re finally getting our first look at the social media-focused movie making tool.
The news came via a post on the official Google Photos Forum and it looks like the movie maker for Google Photos on ChromeOS is already rolling out at a staggered pace to some users. I, personally, don’t keep Android apps installed on my Chromebook. That said, I enabled them and was pleasantly surprised to see that I already have the movie maker under the creation tab in Google Photos.
As demonstrated last year, the new feature allows you to pick a template or start from scratch. You can select photos or videos from your Photos or your local device and Google will stitch them together into a video. If you pick a template, you can then select specific people from you Google Photos app and the movie maker will automatically select a few images of those specific people and add some background music.
From there, you can edit each individual image or video with the usual Photos tools including auto enhancement, cropping, filters and more. You can also switch out the audio if you prefer something different than what Google selected. Once you click “finish movie,” Google will take over and in a minute or two, you’ll get a notification that your video is ready.
Apart from that, there’s not a whole lot going on here with the first iteration of the movie maker. There’s no option for text overlays, no transitions and no way, that I can find, to mute audio from individual videos in the timeline. That said, this is a quick and easy way to stitch together photos and videos to prepare them for uploading to whichever social media platform you like. Honestly, I was hoping for a bit more from the Google Photos movie maker after all this time waiting but it is early. I would presume that Google will add more features as time goes on. Of course, there’s always LumaFusion if you’re looking for a much more robust video editor for your Chromebook.
The new movie maker for Google Photos on Chromebooks is rolling out for some users as we speak. The full roll out will likely take days or weeks as Google keeps an eye out for bugs and hiccups. You can find the forum announcement here.
