Scanning pictures and uploading them to Google Photos is a great way to digitize your collection. With unlimited high-quality storage and text recognition capabilities, it's hard to pass up. And for your older family pictures, Google Photos will soon even colorize black and white images.
Unfortunately, the colorization feature is not available just yet. But we do have reason to believe it's coming very soon.
The feature was first announced at Google I/O 2018. After a year of radio silence in May 2019, Mashable called Google out about it. At that time, Google Photos product lead David Lieb apologized and said the feature was still in the works.
1/ We humbly accept @Mashable's "zero 👏and 💩" award for our Colorize feature not being launched yet. It's in the works -- we just didn't want to rush it!https://t.co/vUaM18w5bt
Lieb even went on to showcase a demo of the feature on a photo of his grandmother. From the looks of it, the feature will be dead-simple to use: just tap the edit button while viewing a photo, then one of the filter options will be "Colorize." Tap that to see the magic happen almost instantly.
2/ Here's a photo of my 104yo grandmother on her wedding day, colorized with Google Photos on my phone. (You can see we have some work to do; my grandfather didn't wear pink pants to his wedding!) pic.twitter.com/Ni8v0Bz3vg
But the biggest piece of evidence we have for Colorize coming soon is a late August APK teardown done by 9to5Google where they discovered code dedicated specifically to the new feature. It will be a beta feature at first, indicated by a tooltip that reads "Add color to old photos (BETA)." Another piece of code had a comment stating that Google is "actively collecting feedback on this feature to improve results," likely with an internal, Googlers-only version of the app.
Just updated your iPhone to iOS 18? You'll find a ton of hot new features for some of your most-used Apple apps. Dive in and see for yourself:
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