Google Photos offers a great way to organize your library thanks to the incredibly useful face tagging feature. It's already quite powerful, being able to recognize people's faces even when they were babies, and now Google is improving its capabilities to be able to figure out who someone is even without seeing their face in a picture.
The app's face tagging abilities have started figuring out who someone is using only the back of their head, Android Authority reports. Former Android Police editor Rita El Khoury had snapped several pictures of her husband where his face wasn't visible and became shocked when Google Photos prompted her to tag him in the images.
El Khoury speculates that the app could be creating a model of her husband's head based on previously captured photos and videos where his hair is visible. She says it could also just be that Google Photos is associating the images with others taken in the same timeframe that showed her husband in totality.
Google Photos tagging the back of someone's head (Source: Android Authority)
There is a caveat, however. The face tagging doesn't automatically mark the person. Instead, it just says face available to add in the card that appears when you swipe up on an image. Tapping this lets you can confirm if the person is indeed the same one the app suggested.
Despite its usefulness, the feature apparently only worked on 80–85% of the pictures El Khoury took of her husband. Given how complicated it could be to recognize people without seeing their face, it's a pretty solid accuracy rate.
In my Google Photos library, I noticed this had also worked with some of the pictures taken of my friends who had their backs turned in a photo. The results were slightly more mixed, but some photos appropriately tagged the person when their face wasn't visible to the camera.
It's unclear if this is a new feature in Google Photos, but if one thing is for certain, it's that Google is always looking to make its gallery app that much smarter. Its upcoming Magic Editor feature is shaping up to be a monstrous expansion to the Magic Eraser feature we've seen on Pixel phones, and the app just added the ability to manually create Cinematic Photos in a few taps.