Google Photos Finally Lets You Fix All Your Mirror-Image Selfies
Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Photos started rolling out a tool to horizontally flip pics last September.
- Today Google shares that this option is broadly available to Android users.
- There’s still no ETA on the flip button coming to Photos on iOS.
How many times has this happened to you: You’re taking a photo with your phone’s front-facing selfie cam, but when you go to share it you realize that all the text in the image is backwards, like you’re looking in a mirror? Plenty of phones flip the image we see from our font-facers in their viewfinders, which makes taking a selfie feel a whole lot more natural. But if the phone also saves your pic that way, you’re going to see this mirror-image effect. Thankfully, Google Photos has a handy way to take care of this annoying little issue.
You’d think that horizontally flipping an image would be a day-one feature of an app with editing tools like Google Photos, but for years this option was absent — you could crop or rotate your pics all day, but had to look elsewhere for help with a simple flip. Last September, we finally spotted Google doing something about this long-standing oversight, as Photos added a new “flip” button to crop controls.
At the time, however, we weren’t seeing this on all our devices, and it looked like Google was slowly rolling it out. Either Google took its sweet time doing so, had to pause things for a moment, or the company’s only remembering about this now, but today Google formally announces image mirroring in Photos.
Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
In order to convert a mirror-image photo to one where everything looks the right way around, simply select a picture in Google Photos, tap the Edit button, select Crop tools, and look for the new flip button between the options for rotation and perspective correction.
Right now, Google says this option is only available in Photos on Android. The company doesn’t offer any specific timeline on when we might hope to see the tool accessible on iOS, but considering how long it took to arrive on Android in the first place, you’ll forgive us for not holding our breath.
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