Do you like to keep your snapshots and even video recordings neatly organized and grouped together by their subject or location? Then you must be familiar with the powerful and incredibly helpful face grouping tool built into the hugely popular Google Photos service.
As the name suggests, this relies on facial recognition technology, either automatically adding a (previously created) label to a pic detected as featuring one of your close friends or family members or allowing you to manually do that when the app is not entirely sure of a person's presence in a photograph.
But what if someone has their back turned on you in an image (or a dozen) saved in your Google Photos account? You'd probably expect, well, nothing to happen, and while that may have been true until recently, it appears that Big G has somehow improved the app's face recognition capabilities and basically expanded them to also cover the back of one's head.
As originally reported by Android Authority and since corroborated (at least in part) by 9To5Google, the app's face grouping functionality can now offer to label a person for you simply by looking... at their neck.
The neat new (non-) facial recognition trick doesn't work perfectly 100 percent of the time, but it still looks like it could save some users a little bit of hassle in trying to keep all artsy pics of loved ones grouped together. Of course, Google is well aware that the expanded feature can be wrong in its scans, letting you manually add face labels to photos recognized in this (relatively) new way rather than doing that automatically to avoid possible errors.
By no means magical (even though it might seem that way at first glance), the Google Photos face grouping tool most likely associates similar pictures showing the same person from the front and back. That's definitely not rocket science or the search giant's most advanced machine learning capability by a mile, but it makes for an undeniably cool end result.
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Adrian, a mobile technology enthusiast since the Nokia 3310 era, has been a dynamic presence in the tech journalism field, contributing to Android Authority, Digital Trends, and Pocketnow before joining PhoneArena in 2018. His expertise spans across various platforms, with a particular fondness for the diversity of the Android ecosystem. Despite the challenges of balancing full-time parenthood with his work, Adrian's passion for tech trends, running, and movies keeps him energized. His commitment to mid-range smartphones has led to an eclectic collection of devices, saved from personal bankruptcy by his preference for 'adequate' over 'overpriced'.
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