Google Photos Can Now Tag People Even if They Aren’t Facing the Camera: Report

The ability to create on-demand Cinematic photos is also being rolled out.

Written by Sheldon Pinto, Edited by Siddharth Suvarna | Updated: 9 June 2023 14:36 IST

Google Photos Can Now Tag People Even if They Aren’t Facing the Camera: Report

Google’s Photos app is a standard on all handsets running the Android mobile operating system

Highlights

Face, people tagging in Photos app has been available for a while
The Photos app at times may not mark the person automatically
Cinematic photos is now being added as a photo effect

Google seems to have added more capability to its already impressive photo recognition capabilities. The feature comes of use when tagging people in captured photos and Google's Photos app is usually spot on when it comes to doing the same. A new trick that Google Photos has introduced (on the server end) is to recognise people even though they aren't facing the camera when the image was captured. It seems to work quite impressively, but it comes with a catch. At the same time, Google has also started adding a new Cinematic photo effect to Photos that was previously an automated feature.

The feature was spotted by Android Authority's Rita El Khoury when she started getting suggestions of photos of her husband in the Photos app. Her findings suggest that Google Photos managed to figure out that it was her husband based on the back of his head. This applies not just to newly uploaded photos, but even those that may have been captured years ago and are stored on a user's Google Photos backup.

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Photos does not let users manually tag people whose faces aren't facing the camera, and this often meant that they had to be manually moved to a vacation or trip folder, so that these could be found easily. Khoury suggests that Google Photos is actually making a model of a person's face, which has been sourced from various photos and videos in a given library.

Or it could also be the case where Google is using location data or a scene to put it all together and confirm that the person in the photo is the same person who is facing the camera in another using its machine learning skills.

Regardless of how it's able to do it. It sure is impressive! The user has started seeing old photos getting accurately tagged even though the person's face isn't visible in them. And if Photos is unsure, it will simply prompt the user to tag the person manually, which is also nice to have, as it was not possible to tag such images earlier.

Another new Photos feature spotted by Android Police is the ability to add a fake cinematic effect to regular photos. While the cinematic effect of slowly zooming into a photo has been available in Google's Photos app for a while, users were only sent suggestions or recommendations based on photos that were handpicked automatically by the app itself.

The source reports that the new Cinematic Photo effect seems to be rolling out as a server-side update and appearing for users in the Photos app. The Cinematic Photo effect can be found in the Library tab in Utilities, under the Create new section.

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Further reading: Google, Google Photos

Sheldon Pinto

Email Sheldon Pinto

Sheldon Pinto is based in Mumbai, and has several years of experience in reviewing smartphones and gadgets. As a Senior Reviewer at Gadgets 360, you will always find him deeply immersed in his reviews, switching from one phone to another. When the battery dies out, Sheldon is always browsing the web for a good sci-fi movie or reading up on cars and bikes. He also loves creating lists of interesting places to eat and travel. Sheldon is available on Twitter at @shellshocd, and you can mail him at ...More