Google Camera 8.1.200 rolls out for Pixel phones with a toggle to disable auto Night Sight

The Pixel 5 and Pixel 4 5G came with a revamped camera app in the form of the Google Camera 8.0. The updated app introduced several new features, including a reworked UI with new buttons, Night Sight for portrait mode, Cinematic pan, a quick zoom toggle, and more. This was followed by Google Camera 8.1 in November, which added a Storage Saver mode to help users store more photos, albeit at the cost of image and video quality.

Now, Google is rolling out the Google Camera 8.1.200 for Pixel phones. Although this update doesn’t introduce any major features or substantial UI changes, it does come with a useful quality-of-life change. The update shifts the Night Sight toggle from the bottom right-hand corner of the viewfinder to the “Flash” section of the in-viewfinder settings pop-up. More importantly, it also adjusts the behavior of the “flash off” option to also disable automatic Night Sight.

Auto Night Sight is a feature of the Google Camera app that works when you’re in the regular Photo or Portrait mode. In the current version, the Night Sight automatically kicks in under low-light conditions, and there’s no way to have the feature turned off by default.

As you can see in the screenshots below, there’s a toggle in the bottom right-hand corner to turn off Auto Night Sight, but this only applies for that current session – it defaults to on again the next time you open the Google Camera app. Not every low-light photo warrants the use of Night Sight mode, so the process of having to turn off the Auto Night Sight mode every time you open the camera app in low-light conditions seemed counter-intuitive and annoying.

However, with version 8.1.200, you can disable Auto Night Sight entirely by turning off the Flash, which has been combined with the toggle for Auto Night Sight.