Google Photo’s is on fire, first we had the I/O Keynote announcements, then yesterday we got a new archive feature (which by the way is now live on the web). Today Google is rolling out some of the pre-work needed to enable AI-powered face sharing.
Today’s update, which is coming to Android, the Web and iOS is currently accessible on the web, just go to photos.google.com and you should be prompted to identify yourself. Once you have, you can then search Google Photos for ‘Me’, or ‘Me and Barcelona’ and get all the images of you in Barcelona.
The other element of identifying yourself to Google Photos is it will now prompt your contacts to share images of YOU with YOU from within THEIR Google Photos account. Yep, this is the first hooks we’re seeing that will enable to soon to be released Photo sharing. It’s interesting to see that perhaps for you to get notifications to share images of a friend they will need to be the phone that allows it.
Of course, even if you select your image you can still toggle off the ability for your contacts to recognise you and share images from their galleries. Just go into settings, select Options and toggle ‘Allow contacts to recognise your face’ in the Group similar faces menu.
Unfortunately, the controls over who will get these notifications on an individual level is not fully within your control. If you go to the new contacts setting in Google photos (web only for now), you can block certain users from getting the prompt, but you can’t add or change the list of people who will get the notification. Google will be handling that for now based on your interactions in Gmail and Google photos.
I look forward to all of the cries of Google is doing X with your image data when it uses a face selected in your photos to notify someone else, from your contacts list, to send you images of yourself. Despite the controls for this all being within your control privacy nuts and Google haters will rejoice in a new issue to spank them with. Of course, from their perspective, I’m a Google lover letting them do whatever they want.
Either way, it’s exciting to see Google photos continue to expand and a hit at the incoming automatic image sharing.
