Google Photos is working on a cleaner collage experience by grouping templates into theme-based categories, while a separate in-development “Soba” tool hints at an AI-powered video feature—but it’s not functional yet.
You open Google Photos hoping to find something creative fast, and instead you’re met with a collage carousel that keeps going and going. Soon, that friction could be about to change.
On the app’s Create page. Google Photos already offers a collage tool for combining multiple photos into one image—something people use for sharing. printing. or posting to social media. But work in progress suggests the collage experience is getting a makeover in two ways. First, Photos is preparing border editing tools for collages, with border appearance editing still not live at the moment. Alongside that, there’s another change already taking shape: the app is getting ready to group collage templates by themes.
Right now. the rollout isn’t active for everyone. but the template organization appears to be moving toward a clear set of categories. When collage templates finally get the themed grouping. they’re expected to appear under these labels: Featured. Grid. Film. Classic. Love. Celebration. Floral. Decoration. and Shapes.
The idea is simple: instead of scrolling through a lengthy carousel of options. you’ll be able to jump into a smaller set of curated choices. Photos is already showing signs of a UI shift. with the collage interface preparing a new button to view available templates. When that button is ready to deploy, the categories are expected to sit alongside it.
Then there’s the other development—one that feels stranger, and far less ready. Within Photos, there are early signs of an additional tool that appears to be called “Soba.” The only clues so far are the name “Soba” and an icon that seems to point toward an AI-powered video feature.
But Soba isn’t working yet. Trying to access the tool at this stage doesn’t bring up functionality—it just returns an error message. It’s also not clear what makes Soba distinct, especially since Google Photos already has a photo-to-video AI tool.
At the moment, the best way to think about Soba is that it’s stuck in a testing phase. An APK teardown approach has been used to predict features that may arrive later by looking at work-in-progress code. Even then, nothing guarantees a predicted feature will make it to a public release.
For now. Google Photos is clearly steering its creative tools toward two different directions: easier. faster collage template browsing through themed categories—and a possible new AI video tool still too broken to touch. The second part might be the more exciting leap. The first one. at least. is already aiming at the daily frustration many people run into when they try to build something quickly.
Google Photos collages collage templates AI video Soba Android Google Photos Create page photo-to-video
So basically Google Photos is gonna make collages “easier” but it still won’t load half the time for me lol.
Featured, Grid, Film… I mean cool, but why does it feel like they’re just moving buttons around. Also “Soba” sounds like a food thing not AI video.
I tried to find that Soba thing already and it errored, so I’m like… is it even real or is this just marketing. And they already have photo-to-video so what’s the point, like it’s gonna be the same thing but called different.
The themed collage categories is fine I guess, but I swear Google keeps adding “AI” anything and then it’s broken. Probably gonna be one of those features where it only works for certain phones or accounts. Next they’ll make it “Celebration” and “Love” and you can’t even change the border anyway.