Google’s Camera app has a few captivating unconventional behavior that anyone who’s dealt with Pixel phones has had to come to terms with.
One of them is its file management policy for managing Portrait mode shots – for each one of these, it creates a set aside folder to hold two images, one with the applied blurred background processing and one that is as shot.
This has turn out challenging for viewing in basically any app that’s not Google Photos, on desktop too.
As narrated by AndroidPolice, beginning with v7.5, that’s no longer going to be the case – Portrait mode shots will be saved in the base Camera folder.
If you’re a smartphone reviewer that means no longer having to go through hoops to compare two portraits on a PC. If you’re a regular person it means your portraits will observe the history of all your other photos.
Further helping with this is the fact that files will be titled in a different way overall.
According to the new convention, portraits will now be named PXL_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.PORTRAIT-01.COVER.jpg with the 01 replaced with 02 for the pre-blur image.
Compare that to the old-style 0100*PORTRAIT_00100_BURSTYYYYMMDDHHMMSS_COVER.jpg nonsense (what’s behind the asterisk seems to vary between versions). We’re also appreciating the added clarity from a simple underscore separator between date and time.
In the meantime, regular non-portraits will be named PXL_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg. Motion photos will add an ‘MP’ before the .jpg extension, while Night Sight shots will manifest themselves with a ‘NIGHT’, allowing you more easily be familiar with what’s what.
One more new development is that the ‘PXL’ prefix replaces the ‘IMG’ of old, disclosing to everyone you share photos with that you’re on #teampixel (is that still a thing?).
The changes appear in v7.5 of the Google Camera app which only works on Android 11 for the time being, itself still in beta.
