Home > Lifestyle

Give Your Google Photos an Ultra HDR Makeover

By Sayak Boral
Featured Image: change any image in Google Photos to Ultra HDR format.

On your Google Photos app in Android, you will find an “Ultra HDR” editing feature which converts any uploaded image files to the ultra HDR format. You get more naturalistic images that are brighter and more crystal clear than the original. Here’s how to enrich Your Google Photos pics with an ultra HDR makeover.

How Ultra HDR Enhances Google Photos

If your standard images appear dull, you can now use Google Photos to enhance them with the latest Ultra HDR feature. This improves brightness (measured in nits) across the darkest and brightest areas of an image. A higher HDR also enhances color and contrast, greatly improving the overall visual quality.

Currently, this feature is only available in Android for the Google Photos application version 7.24.0.747539053, and higher. They may be introduced in iOS or desktop browsers in the future, but there’s no official confirmation from Google yet.

To know whether you need to update your Google Photos app’s Android version, click your user icon on top, select Photos settings, and scroll near About.

Google Photos version shown above is the minimum requirement for Ultra HDR editing.

Here’s a very brief technical explanation of how this thing works. There is an HDR photography concept called “gain map,” where an image is upgraded for HDR screens by storing additional brightness and contrast information in each pixel. The image then adjusts luminance and tone mapping to give you a richer display.

Related: If you’re a Samsung Galaxy user, there are similar HDR features you can access in Samsung Gallery.

How to Convert Your SDR Images in Google Photos to Ultra HDR

To convert your standard images to ultra HDR in Google Photos, launch its Android application. Make sure the app was updated to the required 7.24.0.747539053 version or higher, as discussed above. Now open any image and click the Edit button.

Clicking "Edit" for an Android image uploaded to Google Photos.

On a horizontal slider for Suggestions, you can see many options. Select Adjust -> Ultra HDR (there used to be a deprecated menu called “HDR Effects“).

After you convert the image to ultra HDR format, click Done, and the image will be upgraded automatically. To get the best experience from the new feature, try editing any nighttime photos uploaded to Google Photos. They will be visibly brighter with more natural lighting spanning the image area.

Finally, click Save Copy. It will automatically store a separate ultra HDR image file in Google Photos for the same calendar date. The image will also be stored in any Google Photos album from where you retrieved the original image. This consumes extra storage Google storage space. When you check the image EXIF metadata, you will find “ultra HDR” specified.

A Google Photos image adjusted by HDR in "Adjust" followed by "Save copy

If you cannot view the Ultra HDR feature while editing your images even after updating your Google Photos app, just wait a while as Google rollouts can be slow. It will eventually be universally available.

The good thing about this new feature is it is backward compatible, allowing ultra HDR upgraded images to be viewable in standard SDR format on non-HDR screens. It also offers cross-platform compatibility with iOS 18 and all the major browsers on Windows and Mac. The only requirement is that the user’s screen must be HDR-capable and support the ISO 21496-1 standard.

Of course, editing so many Google Photos images to ultra HDR can affect your Google account storage limits. For those looking to downsize, consider deleting the duplicates of your images. You can also take a backup of Google Photos to your Windows PC.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Sayak Boral Avatar
Sayak Boral
Sayak Boral is a technology writer with over eleven years of experience working in different industries including semiconductors, IoT, enterprise IT, telecommunications OSS/BSS, and network security. He has been writing for MakeTechEasier on a wide range of technical topics including Windows, Android, Internet, Hardware Guides, Browsers, Software Tools, and Product Reviews.

Read next

When Cingular chief Stan Sigman backed the original iPhone before its 2007 unveiling, he accepted terms American carriers usually refused: no logo on the device, no control over its software, no preloaded apps, and a share of monthly subscriber revenue flowing back to Apple, after signing on without seeing a prototype
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When Edme Mariotte stared at marks on a wall in the 1660s, one mark vanished inside a six-degree hole where the optic nerve leaves the eye and the brain has been filling in wallpaper, sky, and faces ever since
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.