10 Tricks To Effortlessly Find Anything With Google Photos

Google Photos makes it easy to search for faces. The service aggregates all images it finds of the same face, regardless of whether you’ve tagged the person by name or done any other organization manually.

The easiest way to get started is by tapping the search bar. At the bottom of the suggested searches is a row of faces, nine circular icons, each with a face Google found in your archive. To see photos of that face, just tap on the icon. Tap the “view all” link beneath the row of faces to reveal the People & Pets page with large, square icons for indexed faces.

The service may prompt you to confirm if two images are the same face so it can group the faces and return better results. If you don’t like the photo chosen for the top level, simply click into a face, tap the circular icon at the top left, and select a different photo to represent that person when you search. While you’re there, you can also add a person’s name so you can get faster results.

One gotcha to Google’s approach: It indexes and groups ALL faces across ALL image types in your Google Photos archive. If you take a lot of screenshots of news stories, for example, Google Photos indexes those faces alongside those of the people you care about. You can edit which faces you see, but doing so simply hides a face as opposed to deleting it.

Google only recently expanded the name of this page to People & Pets — specifically cats and dogs — so you can find your fur babies, too. To reflect this change, People & Pets is also accessible at the top of the Explore page.