TL;DR
- Code within the Google Photos app suggests Magic Editor might get generative AI prompts.
- The code hints at text-to-image generation capabilities, for starters.
Google launched its Magic Editor tool alongside the Pixel 8 series last month, bringing some impressive and intuitive editing features to the table. These features include letting you move people and objects around, resizing elements, and much more.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Google Photos v6.60 for Android includes two references suggesting that text-to-image prompts are coming to the Magic Editor tool.
Code
<string name="photos_photoeditor_udon_cannot_input_blocked_prompt_dialog_text">Magic Editor can’t generate images based on some of the words in the prompt. Try typing something else.</string>
<string name="photos_photoeditor_udon_cannot_generate_personally_identifiable_information_dialog_text">Magic Editor can't generate images that may have personally identifiable information. Try typing something else.</string>The strings specifically note that Magic Editor can’t generate an image based on some words in the prompt, nor can it generate pictures with personal information. This certainly hints at the ability to generate images for use within Magic Editor.
What could this mean for Magic Editor?
We’d imagine that Google could use prompts to let you generate new backgrounds, objects, or even expanded photo borders. But this is just speculation for now, as there aren’t any other prompt-related strings in this latest version of Google Photos.
There’s no evidence for this, but we also wonder whether these strings are a sign of prompt-based editing coming to Magic Editor. Simply typing “Move me to the middle, erase the guy in the background, and give me a clear sky” could be faster and more intuitive than manually making adjustments.
The presence of these code strings isn’t a guarantee that text-to-image prompts are coming to Magic Editor. It’s entirely possible this feature gets dropped before it sees the light of day. But with next-generation smartphones poised to offer super-fast text-to-image generation and generative AI backgrounds for image capture, we wouldn’t be surprised if Google eventually provides similar functionality in its editing suite to keep up with other Android flagships.
