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Google Camera review
August 20, 2025
Functionality
Okay, so this is a camera app which means it does camera app things like taking video and pictures. The camera app comes with five modes including Panorama Mode, Photosphere Mode, regular Camera Mode, Video Mode, and a new thing called Lens blur mode. The regular video and camera modes are pretty much self-explanatory.
Panorama and Photosphere Mode are a little wonky to use but when you get a good photo with them, you may get some really awesome stuff. It works by starting out with a single picture and then you must follow the dots to create a complete panorama or photosphere. Depending on whether or not you have high quality or low quality enabled in the settings, it can take a minute to process and render everything but the photos usually come out looking really good.
Lens blur Mode allows you to take a picture that keeps the subject of your photo in focus while making the background blurry. This is a popular depth of field effect that is enjoyed predominately by people who have DSLR cameras. If the blur is too much or too little, you may adjust the level of blur after the photo is taken.
That’s really it folks. There is a settings menu where you’re able to adjust various resolutions and quality settings. I wasn’t able to find any options to change the storage location if you were wondering about that.
For a camera app, it’s fairly well designed. You can change your camera mode at any point by sliding to the right from anywhere and the modes will slide out from the left side. If you want to view any photos you’ve taken, you simply side your finger to the left and it’ll open your most recently taken photo. It’s worth noting that this doesn’t come with a gallery app so you’ll need to use the one installed on your device or go download Google Photos if you want the complete Google experience.
The settings are set up in a way that’s easy to understand. They seem a little bare bones but you’re able to adjust the front and rear facing camera resolution, turn location on and off, and turn on manual exposure if you need it.
There are other fun little design choices. When you zoom in and out using pinch to zoom you see two little bars that will show you how zoomed in the camera is. At the bottom are some quick settings icons for flash, exposure, changing from front facing to rear camera, and an icon to add a three by three grid.
Okay so here’s what we liked.
And here’s the bad.
Final thoughts
Overall, this is a solid camera app. It brings a lot of those nifty Google Camera-only features like Photosphere to devices that don’t normally have that feature available. The design is breathtakingly fresh and enjoyable and nothing about Google Camera is difficult to use. The only issue seems to be the few bugs that people are experiencing. That said, I do hope more features get integrated eventually because it is very simple but almost a little too simple.
Ron Amadeo from Ars Technicadid an app tear downand found code hinting to an advanced settings feature that I hope becomes a reality and a Timelapse feature that sounds fairly cool. Here’s hoping those get introduced in future updates. Until then, Google Camera is a great application as long as you keep things in perspective. It doesn’t give you the level of control of other apps, but you really get that vibe that it’s not supposed to. If you’re looking for something different in a camera app, it’s definitely worth downloading this one to give it a shot.
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