Google Photos just made it a lot easier to avoid seeing certain pictures, as it now lets you hide the people you don't want to see.
If you'd rather not see your ex pop up in your Google Photos collections, but you still don't have the heart to delete those pictures, Google now has a solution: just hide them.
Google's "face grouping" facial detection feature for Photos is already available for users in the U.S. and it will soon make its way to more markets, rolling out to Canada, Latin America, Australia, the Caribbean, New Zealand and parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Thanks to this neat facial detection feature in Google Photos version 1.8, users will be able to easily find or hide photos of certain people.
"See similar faces grouped together in Search, and privately label faces to quickly search for the person you're looking for. Tap the search button to get started," Google explains.
The same feature allows you to hide images of a person such as your ex so they won't show up under People in your Google Photos Collections. Google did not forget about your memories either, as the new feature also lets you avoid seeing events with that person show up in the "Rediscover this Day" cards in Google Photos Assistant. Those hidden images will still remain in your collection until you decide to delete them, but they won't be visible in the People catalog or those Assistant cards.
Simply put, Google Photos is ready to automatically organize faces and people in your online image library so you don't have to. Images of the same person will be grouped together so you can find or hide them more easily and thumbnail photos will represent folders, allowing you to label them for quicker access.
In addition to these improved facial recognition features, Google Photos v1.8 also adds support for pinch to zoom on search results, which should further make things easier and more convenient. At the same time, Google also boasts that its latest update will bring "spooky fast performance improvements and bug fixes."
The new updates have already started rolling out for Android users, with the latest version of Google Photos available now on the Play Store in select markets. The same improvements will hit iOS and the web "very soon."
