Activate the facial recognition function in the Google photo library to more easily find the photos of your loved ones.
If you use Google Photos to manage your photos, you are not without having that the service of Google, doped with artificial intelligence, allows you to easily search for photos by entering the names of objects, fruit, vegetables, etc., or to extract text contained in an image to use it in another application thanks to Google Lens. But Google Photos is also able to recognize faces and animals.
Disabled by default, face recognition is however extremely practical to easily find the photos of your loved ones in the middle of the thousands of snapshots stored in your library. Find out how to activate it and how to use it to take full advantage of it, from the web version or the iOS or Android app.
- Go to Google Photos (Free)
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- Download Google Photos for iPhone (Free)
1. Activate face recognition
If you haven’t already, head over to Google Photos, tap the main menu, and enter Google Photos Settings. Then enter the Group similar faces menu and activate the Grouping of faces.
From there, Google Photos should start working to automatically sort photos based on the faces in them. If the function is activated for the first time and your photo library is large, wait a few hours or even a few days for the platform to regroup the photos by classifying them by faces. When new images are stored on the service, face recognition will be automatically applied to them.
2. Access photos by face
To find the images classified according to the face, go to the tab dedicated to Search. At the top of the screen are grouped the People whose faces have been detected. You can scroll them to the left, or access all detected faces by tapping Show all.
3. Identify faces and refine recognition
For each face, it is possible to enter the name of the person. To do this, tap a face and then at the top of the list of photos where the face has been detected, tap Add name.
If you have already identified the person, Google Photos will ask you to confirm whether or not it is the same face, in order to associate the new photos with it. You will thus help the artificial intelligence to refine the recognition of the faces on the future images loaded in the application.
4. Show or hide people
Chances are, you have photos in your library of people whose faces you don’t necessarily want to see as soon as you open Google Photos. To avoid this, it is possible to hide people (or display more, as desired).
To do this, go to the Search tab of Google Photos, then in the People section, tap View All. Then press the option button, represented by three small dots and choose to Hide and show people.
From here, you can choose to display or hide the faces recognized in the application, but also take the opportunity to refine Google’s artificial intelligence by adding new images to a face already identified in the application.
5. Remove photos from the results
When trying to recognize faces, Google Photos may make some mistakes. If you spot one or more images that do not match the face to which they are associated, select the photos, press the options button represented by the three small dots, and choose to Remove them from the results.
Do not hesitate to repeat each of the operations from time to time to validate new photos associated with already known faces so that the face recognition of Google Photos improves and automatically associates more photos with the right faces.