Chromebook owners can now avail themselves of the ability to quickly and easily put together and edit movies thanks to Google Photos.
As Android Police spotted, this new video editing functionality was revealed by Google last month, but it’s now rolling out to all Chromebook users.
The way it works is that you can choose the option to create a movie in Google Photos, then pick a theme – the example Google shows is ‘friendship’ – then select relevant elements, in this case, the friends you want to star in the clip.
The movie creator will then pull images and videos of those friends from Google Photos, automatically putting together some footage, and even intelligently picking sections out from longer video clips (cutting and trimming itself, basically).
If you prefer, you can put together your own selection, and indeed add clips from local files on the Chromebook too.
Whatever the case, once you’ve got that initial set of clips combined into a movie, you can then mess about with it in the movie editor. It’s possible to cut down various clips as needed, add filters, play with elements like brightness and so on. Finally, you can throw in a (stock) soundtrack to liven things up.
Most Chromebooks will already have Google Photos installed, but if that isn’t the case, you can hop over to the Play Store and just download the app.
Analysis: A compelling slice of convenience
Video editing on Chromebooks is pretty limited in terms of available software – and not everyone wants to use a web-based editor – so this built-in feature is a very welcome string to the functionality bow with Google’s laptops.
The automation aspect of getting the movie creator to trawl through your media and put together something within your specified guidelines is pretty cool, and takes a lot of the effort out of rooting through your pics and clips collection. Which can be a pretty daunting task if you have a lot of media, of course.
Granted, this may never be quite as good as tailoring something yourself, but it’s a seriously convenient option to have all the legwork done for you. As Google notes, all it takes is a few clicks here and there, and you’ve got yourself a video clip (though you’ll still need to edit it, but even then, you can go with a minimal effort approach, of course).
