Snapseed is prepping a major upgrade for long exposure photography

The Snapseed app currently includes a Pro camera interface that lets you manually adjust ISO, shutter speed, and focus before you capture a photo. These are key controls for photographers who want to get more out of their images in different environments. We can now report on a potential addition to Snapseed that could further expand its feature set.

Long exposure photography is suited to capturing movement over time. It works by keeping the camera’s shutter open for a specific duration, say a fraction of a second, or even longer, resulting in moving objects appearing blurred or with a trail, while stationary objects stay sharp.

We dug into Snapseed version 4.1.12 and found a few strings of code that reference a Long exposure feature with a handful of modes, ranging from 1.2 seconds to 6 seconds.

• Extended silk (5s)
• Light trails (6s)
• Live Photo (1.5s)
• Motion freeze (2s)
• Night (1.2s)
• Silky water (3s)

The names of these modes give us an early hint of what they’re supposed to do. For instance, Night could be designed for low-light situations, while Silky water may be ideal for photographing running water, like at a lake or waterfall.

Light trails could suit photographing moving vehicles at night, with Extended silk potentially being a longer-exposure version of Silky water. Although Live Photo sounds similar to a standard motion photo, it’s unclear what effect it is meant to achieve.

We also found strings that mention a progress indicator for long-exposure modes, with Snapseed asking users to “Hold still” while it processes the image. There could also be a toggle to turn off long exposure entirely.

Adding multiple long exposure modes in Snapseed is a great way to make some of these camera effects more accessible, especially for people unfamiliar with manual photography controls. It could also save users the trouble of making these changes manually while editing the image in Snapseed or via another app.

We don’t have visuals of these new long exposure modes in action yet, which isn’t unusual for early feature discoveries. With that in mind, it’s hard to say whether Snapseed will implement these new photography modes anytime soon.

However, we’ll keep an ear to the ground for more details on this feature addition. Beyond potentially introducing long-exposure modes to the camera interface, we’ve recently seen evidence that Snapseed is making its camera interface easier to open, including through a Quick Settings tile.