The facial recognition software built directly into Google Photos is already fantastically accurate, distinguishing your friends and family from even the blurriest of pixels. However, like any AI-driven tool, it's not perfect, and sometimes it just doesn't know who's actually in your pictures. Thanks to our friends over at XDA Developers, we now have our first look at an upcoming manual facial tagging feature that's currently hidden away within Google Photos 4.32.
Manual facial tagging works just about how you'd expect. After you take a picture, Photos will present you with a list of unrecognizable people that you can add. Select your mystery person to see if they match up with anyone in your previous photos. If they don't, you can add this person to the list, as well as designate other photos taken with them to improve Google's algorithm. This will then prompt Google Photos' automatic facial recognition tech to group all remaining images that include your new person of interest.
Above: Locate an unrecognized person with photo. Below: Create new person using manual facial tagging. Images: XDA Developers
We first caught wind of manual facial recognition in Photos when product lead, David Lieb, took to Twitter to glean feedback from users in July. Though this feature still isn't available to the public, the fact that it's lying dormant within the latest version of Google Photos is a great indicator that manual facial tagging may be ready for its official debut soon.
Source: XDA Developers