The Galaxy S26’s photo app can sloppify your memories | The Verge
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Samsung’s S26 series offers some new AI photo editing capabilities to transform your photos. But where’s the line between acceptable edits and slop?
TechAIMobileThe Galaxy S26’s photo app can sloppify your memoriesPhotos are whatever you want them to be, I guess.Photos are whatever you want them to be, I guess.by Allison JohnsonMar 31, 2026, 6:15 PM UTCLinkShareGiftLove to see the BACKSST BOYS at the Sphere.Allison Johnson is a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.The Google Pixel 9 walked so that the Samsung Galaxy S26 could run.Google introduced AI editing tools to Photos slowly. It started with changes to the background — make the sky more blue, or remove crowds of tourists. Things got weird once the company added natural language requests and let you ask for basically any change. There were some guardrails, but in many cases it was easy to prompt your way around them into creating a potentially harmful image of something that never happened — helicopter crashes, smoking bombs on street corners, that kind of thing.That’s the world Samsung’s updated Photo Assist steps into. At Unpacked in February, the company announced that its suite of AI editing tools in the gallery app on the S26 would add support for natural language prompts. It didn’t offer anything radically different from what you can already do in Google Photos, but the way that Samsung pitched it offered a more explicit departure from reality. Don’t like the shirt you’re wearing in that picture? Use AI to change it! Wish ...