How to enhance all your photos in Google Photos at once

Google Photos has a one-tap Enhance that fixes exposure, contrast and colour on a single photo. It works well. The problem is that it only ever applies to the photo you have open.

If you came back from a trip with four hundred photos, enhancing them one at a time is an evening you will not get back. Here is how to enhance a whole album in Google Photos in one pass.

What Enhance actually does

Enhance is Google's automatic adjustment. It reads the photo and applies its own mix of brightness, contrast, shadows and colour. It is not a filter and not a style. It is closer to a sensible default correction, which is exactly why it holds up across a large, mixed set of photos.

Because Google Photos keeps the original file, an enhanced photo can always be reverted.

The manual way

1. Open photos.google.com and open a photo.
2. Click Edit.
3. Click Enhance under Suggestions.
4. Save.
5. Move to the next photo and repeat.

About ten seconds per photo, plus the saving. Four hundred photos is somewhere north of an hour of clicking.

How to enhance all photos in Google Photos with Batch

1. Install Batch for Google Photos from the Chrome Web Store.
2. Open Google Photos in Chrome and click Batch.
3. Pick the photos: a date range, an album, or a manual selection.
4. Choose Enhance.
5. Start the run and keep the tab open. Batch applies Google Photos' own Enhance to each photo in turn and shows how far along it is.
6. Look through the album afterwards. Revert anything you prefer the way it was.

The edits happen inside your Google account through Google's editor. No photo is uploaded to a Batch server.

When Enhance is the wrong tool

• Photos that are already well exposed can come out looking slightly overcooked. Enhance a sample first and judge.
• If you want a consistent look rather than a correction, save your own adjustments as a preset instead. See Custom Presets in Google Photos.
• If the album is mostly near-duplicates, choose your keepers first. Enhancing nine versions of the same moment is wasted work. See finding your best shots.

FAQ

Can Google Photos enhance all photos at once?

Not on its own. Enhance applies to the open photo. Applying it across a selection needs an extension such as Batch, which repeats Google's own Enhance across the photos you picked.

Can I undo it?

Yes. Google Photos keeps the original, so Revert to original restores it. Batch can revert an entire selection in one run.

Does it work on videos?

Enhance applies to photos. Videos in the selection are skipped.

How long does a large album take?

It depends on the size of the selection and how quickly Google Photos saves each edit. The run shows a live count and can be stopped at any point, keeping whatever has already been applied.

Enhance is usually the first step. The full guide to bulk editing Google Photos covers crops, filters, captions and presets across the same selection.