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Google’s Pixel 7 and 7 Pro will fix your old blurry photos

Google’s Pixel 7 and 7 Pro will fix your old blurry photos

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Google says your phone will take less blurry pictures but will also be able to fix up older images in your Google Photos library

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A slide showing a photo of a person on the beach, with one half blurry and the other half sharp.
Google’s not just promising better photos with the Pixel 7 — it wants to enhance your old photos as well.
Photo: Chris Welch / The Verge

Google says that you’ll be able to use the Pixel 7 to go back through your Google Photos library and fix old blurry photos, using a feature called Photo Unblur. So far, the feature is exclusive to Google’s latest phones, similar to the Magic Eraser feature launched with the Pixel 6.

Like the feature meant to erase distractions from your images, the Photo Unblur results Google showed off in its presentation were a little hit-or-miss — though some were truly impressive, like the one in the tweet below. Like many of the Pixel 7’s features, the company says this image processing is made possible by its next-gen Tensor G2 processor.

The company also promises that this tech will be applied to the pictures you take with the Pixel 7, saying that its denoising tech lets its new phones take low-light images “twice as fast.”

Google’s focused on reducing blurriness with the Pixel lineup before; the Pixel 6 included a feature called Face Unblur, which used multiple exposures to make sure that the faces in the pictures it took were sharp even if there was motion blur in the rest of the picture. Of course, that didn’t do anything for photos you’d taken in the past.