Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority

TL;DR For its 10th anniversary, Google Photos announced it was overhauling its editor UI.

The new editor was initially supposed to arrive in June, but Google later pushed that back to August.

With August still a few days away, we’re already seeing the new interface roll out.

Google Photos isn’t just a great solution for storing and organizing all your pics, but also a solid all-in-one tool for performing some edits. Back in May, while Google was celebrating 10 years of Photos, we learned that those editing tools were about to get even better. That update was supposed to land sometime in June, but after it failed to materialize as we were expecting, we reached out to Google for an update on the company’s timetable. And now, for the second time, it looks like we have to revise our expectations.

The good news is that we’re not dealing with any more delays, and instead, the update now appears to be heading out a little ahead of schedule. When we checked in with Google back at the start of July, the company confirmed that the new Photos editing experience was in very limited testing, and that the idea was to start pushing the update out widely at some point in August.

We’re still a couple days away from flipping the calendar to August, but we’re already seeing a wave of new reports from users who now have their Photos editing update. On Reddit’s Pixel sub user ABFan86 shares a screenshot of the new editor hitting their phone, and others like edtheridgerunner confirm (via Android Police). We’re seeing the new editor on some — but not all — of our own devices, too.

Reactions are quite mixed, with some users appearing to love the new look, while others sound quite resistant to the change. For what it’s worth, it’s not like Google is taking away any of the functionality you had before, and this shift is mainly going to result in you needing to develop some slightly new muscle memory for how you tap your way through the app’s editor.

That can be an annoyance, granted, but we imagine that many users will ultimately prefer this new layout, emphasizing usability and drawing attention to some of the app’s AI-powered tools. Look for it hitting Photos on your phone very soon.

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