How to enable Face Grouping in Google Photos
Google Photos offers Face Recognition leading to the ability to have Face Grouping. Which means that photos containing a person’s face can be automatically grouped together. Which means it is easy to create an album about that person. And to create such an album to share if so desired. Anyway that is the theory and promise.
That was one of the very biggest reasons why I have recently spent hours looking into Google Photos and installing it. Especially as we lost our beloved mommy recently. And it would be lovely if my family could have a shared album to help ease our grief and bring us closer, even though we might be so far apart in different countries.
That is the hope anyway.
But is Google Photos Face Grouping even available in Australia?
Searching online, it looks as if I am not the only one to wonder that. That feature does not seem to be working in my Google Photos (on the app nor at Google Photos online).
However for me, the answer is YES! Google Photos Face Recognition and Google Photos Face Grouping IS available in Australia. I hope what follows will be of help to you as well.
SOLUTION 1: WAIT
Google Photos did not seem to be doing its supposedly automatic Face Grouping or even Face Recognition thingy. Not for a while anyway despite having made sure I loaded lots of photos to Google Photos.
Sidenote: You need to have “Face Grouping” enabled. To do this:
in Google Photos >> menu (3 horizontal bars at top left) >> Settings >> Group Similar faces >> (turn on) Face Grouping
But now I can see them (and I will show you what it looks like in a moment).
But I am uncertain if the Face Grouping (with my photos) eventually came on automatically or whether it was because of the actions I took. So in case it was because of my actions, see Solution #2 below.
SOLUTION 2: GO ONLINE
Go to your online Google Photos at photos.google.com
(You need to be logged into at least one of the products in Google’s ecosystem, e.g. Gmail, Google Drive, …)
Go to Albums
Click the 3-dot vertical menu icon (top right) >> Show & hide faces
The faces will appear (though of course, it won’t be blurry 🙂 )
Click Done.
Now when you are back in Albums, you will see that actual faces populate the People folder.
That’s it. I hope that helps and you get your beloved faces recognised as well.
FYI: I am an Apple user (iPhone, iPad, Mac) and I was using Chrome browser. So I can’t be sure if this helps across platforms. And I am no expert so might not be able to answer your questions if you have any. I am just sharing solution(s) that worked for me.
CONCLUSION:
Please note that Google Photos will automatically recognise faces. Unfortunately it does not seem to recognise all the faces and it is unclear why that is so. As of the date of this writing, it looks like there is no way that we can manually pick out and label faces to help it along. That is a sad limitation to such a great technology. But even so, it is pretty awesome when it works.
It seems as if Google Photos can recognise more and more faces as you use it. I might write how you can ‘encourage’ this and how to label new found faces in your collection later in another article.
CORRECTION (29 Mar 2019): Looks like Google Photos (yes, even in Australia) does allow you to manually label (give a name to) someone’s face.
