Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Photos is testing a new UI for easier face group editing.
- This new UI simplifies removing and reassigning faces in photos, streamlining the process.
Google Photos is one of Google’s better apps, and it’s a great tool for organizing your photos across Android flagships. One of the app’s most useful features is that it automatically recognizes faces and creates a face group, grouping together all the photos where a particular face (e.g., a person) appears. This allows you to search for all photos where a person or even a group of people appear and feeds into other Google Photos features like Memories. The feature is great, but there’s room for improvement on how Google gives control back to the user, and that’s exactly what the company seems to be working on.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Google Photos v7.23.0 includes code introducing several UI changes for removing recognized faces and fixing a misrecognized one. We activated these changes ahead of their release to give you a glimpse of what changes could be coming our way.
Whenever you click a photo with multiple people in it, Google Photos will attempt to recognize as many faces as possible and create face groups for every person. However, despite being impressive, this grouping is not perfect. There are instances where Google Photos can misrecognize a person/face, and there are also instances where you may not want a photo to show up in a person’s face group.
For both of these instances, Google Photos has an Edit faces option. You can click on the red minus icon to deselect a face from the photo, consequently removing the photo from the person’s face group. If you need to correct a misrecognized face, you can tap on a face in the photo to assign it to a different person. However, this is not very intuitive, and it’s also not easy to figure out how to create a new face group for a new person (it’s the plus icon on the top bar).
Google is planning to simplify this workflow by removing the Edit faces option. Instead, each recognized face will sport its own three-dot menu, with two options nested within: “Remove from this photo” and “This is someone else.”
The first option removes the photo from the person’s face group. The second option lets you reassign the face to a different person through a new UI. This new UI streamlines the reassignment flow and even makes it easy and apparent to add a new person.
We don’t know if/when Google will roll out this new UI. Given its utility, we do hope the redesign comes to fruition.
