Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Photos has been working on an option to show more of a particular person in Memories.
- When we first spotted development, using the option required digging through menus.
- While it still isn’t live, Google has been thinking about bringing the feature to a much more convenient place in the app’s UI.
Google’s always cooking up new features for its apps, and one of our favorite pastimes is digging through all those updates in the hopes of getting a sense for what additions could be coming next. With as long as development can take, though, sometimes we end up getting to see a feature evolve and change form long before it even debuts for public use. That’s just the boat we find ourselves in today, as we look deeper into Google’s work on a forthcoming tweak to Memories in Photos.
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Google Photos lets you automatically organize groups of pics into Memories. One way it helps manage that is by keeping track of faces, recognizing the people you interact with over and over. This past summer, we looked into what appeared to be work on a new option concerning how Memories works with faces, letting you express your interest in seeing more of that person in Memories. While that’s still not yet live, it looks like Google is already thinking about new ways to access this setting.
Checking out the recent version 7.12 release of the Photos app for Android, we can see Google laying the groundwork to make selecting this option for showing more of a face a lot more convenient. When we last checked this out, the only ways to find that option involved a lot of menu navigation — you could either pull up Collections, then People, choose the one you were looking for, and then find this in an overflow menu, or have to navigate with even more taps deep into Photos settings.
Google Photos shows the faces associated with a picture when you tap to pull up its meta data. The app now lets you quickly choose to hide faces from Memories directly from this view, just as we saw the company also working on last summer. While that bit has arrived, “show more” has not — but if and when it does show up, it’s looking like Google will similarly make it available in this very convenient spot.
Just as we were able to prematurely surface this option within Photos settings, in version 7.12 it also appears in this same metadata view. That promises to make adjusting Memories for the right balance of the people we care about (and less of those we don’t) much more convenient, as we can casually tap on people as we’re browsing through these galleries.
Frankly, this feels like an ideal time for Google to finally introduce the option, as it’s going to be a whole lot more visible with this improved placement. But for now, we’re all left waiting for the company to make up its mind about what it intends to do here. We’ll keep cracking open new Photos updates in the hopes of being able to share any future progress with you.
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