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The camera app on Chrome OS has remained largely unchanged since Google first brought Chromebooks to the market in 2011. Although handy in a pinch, its stagnant development is obvious by the lack of useful features. It received video recording only three years ago and recently got a native QR code scanner. While it has improved over the years, its implementation feels too basic to be especially practical. That may soon change, as Google is working to deliver advanced controls to the camera app on Chrome OS.
A few months ago, Google Photos product lead, David Lieb, told us that manually tagging faces was on the app's update roadmap. We didn't hear anything about the feature until last week, when XDA developers managed to find it hidden inside Photos v4.32 and enable it. Now, it's going live for some users, though there's an important asterisk to keep in mind.
Chrome 69 was a massive update, as it brought a brand new interface to both desktop and mobile. Now that v69 is on stable, the beta channel has been updated to version 70. This isn't as big of an update as the previous release, but it still has a few important improvements - particularly for security.
Google's cute little AI camera, Clips, was made to take pictures at opportune times without human oversight. Previously, it was restricted to triggering at things like faces and poses. Now, though, Google has updated the device to recognize a few new scenarios you may want clips of, as well as pair with more than one phone to more easily share those clips with multiple people.
Google bought photo editor Snapseed a little less than four years ago, and the developers have been steadily improving the app and adding new features since then. The latest version is 2.9, which started rolling out to new users yesterday and just hit the publicly-accessible Play Store a few hours ago. There's nothing mind-blowing in the updated version, but a handful of new features will make long-time users happy (and might get rid of one of the other photo apps you rely on concurrently).