Google Photos 1.6 released, awesome
Google Photos released version 1.6 a day or so back and it finally allows you to tag people and give them names. More than just tagging people that Google probably already knew, it allows you to take pictures it miscategorized as a different person, and merge them to the right person.
It’s finally possible with Google Photos to enter a search term “Maggie in a car” or “Maggie and Connor October 2014” and see photos that correspond to Google’s recognition of both a car and a person, or two people and a timeframe. You can also search for pictures without someone in them by putting a “-” in front of a name. Probably useful for searching for pictures without an ex in them.
I’m sure there are more options but I haven’t discovered them yet.
To tag people, tap photos, hit the little magnifying glass in the bottom right, you’ll see your wall of faces pop up. Tapping on any of them will now bring up a prompt to add a tag to them. If Google Photos has recognized someone as two different people you can simply tap the second version of the person, tag them with the same name as the first, and it will ask if you want to merge photos.
There are supposedly more changes coming with shared folders that multiple people can contribute to, but that’s not evident in the app at the moment, may be something they just pull the trigger on later and it will just be there. Who knows?
Google Photos is free, has unlimited upload capacity for certain sized images and can compress larger images than that to keep the unlimited, or you can use lossless storage against your Google Drive balance.
The new Google Photos supposedly also has Chromecast support. Not in a network with a Chromecast at the moment so I can’t tell, but it was supposed to have it.
I have started to believe Photos might also be delving into your contacts and cross referencing them with your Google Plus friends… some of the instant suggestions were a little too spot on.
Download: Google Play