Here’s how Google brought Add Me’s photo composition magic to the Pixel 9

Camera software on smartphones is so good — and has been really good for such a long time — that it can easily start to feel like everything worth doing has already been done. But every once in a while we get a welcome surprise, like we did last year with Add Me on Pixel 9 phones, the incredibly satisfying AI-powered composition tool that let you add subjects to your pics, one by one. As we wait to see if Add Me will make its way to any other Pixel models, Google’s offering a peek behind the curtain, as the company shares the story behind Add Me’s creation.

We first learned about Add Me last summer, in the months leading up to the Pixel 9 launch, but the feature’s genesis dates all the way back to the summer of 2022, when Google software engineer Adi Zicher complained about problems with group pictures always seeming to have somebody missing. There was a lot of enthusiasm among his fellow brainstormers, and after tinkering away on the concept for months, Zicher finally had a demo ready to share.