What you need to know
- Google is starting to develop a feature in Photos that lets users decide which faces they'd like to "see more" of in Memories.
- The feature was reportedly spotted in version 7.12 of the Photos app and is placed alongside the "hide faces" option in a picture's description box.
- Google Photos is also opened its early waitlist for its upcoming "Ask Photos" feature.
Google is reportedly working on a way for people to surface the memories they'd love to see the most in Photos.
A discovery by notable X tipster AssembleDebug (Android Authority), a recent update for Photos reportedly contains details about an upcoming feature refresh. Per the tipster, Google is seemingly working on a way to make faces you'd love to see more of in Photos a little easier. According to the teardown, when viewing a picture in Photos, users can navigate to its information description containing the time it was taken, the lens used, and more.
There, users will also see small snapshots of the faces and people in the photo that the app recognizes.
The tipster's test shows that users may soon be able to long-press a person's icon and see a new pop-up menu. The app's code shows a new option: "Show more in memories." This button joins the "hide face from memories" option, an update the app picked up last year, per the publication.
What's unclear in this early test is if the "show more" option will deliver a pop-up menu like the "hide face" choice. Memories typically creates a collage of a user's photos that can be grouped. The post states that the "hide face" option lets users decide to show "less" of a person's face, but they will still show in grouped collections. However, the alternative involves not showing the person at all, even in grouped situations.
With the (happier) "show more" function in development, perhaps there will be more in store for users who want to relive certain memories of specific people. Maybe users can have the app create curated collages of a singular person or photos with both parties in them. We'll have to wait and see as more concrete details weren't readily available.
The good thing about this previous "show less" change is that it removes the long list of steps previously needed for a simple task. More importantly, there was never a way for users to show more of who they would like to see. The company pushed its new Memories view during the summer of 2023, alongside a few AI-powered tools. With generative AI at its heart, the tab "curates and organizes" your picture together, so long as they're similar. These similarities can include people, places, and occasions (like parties).
The AI will also generate a quick title, which users can fix later.
It's also worth mentioning that Google opened its early test waitlist for its AI-backed "Ask Photos" feature in September. This will bring even more of its software to the app by letting users converse with its AI model about content stored in their photo galleries.
