10 Tips to Find Anything Effortlessly with Google Photos

Google Photos makes finding faces easy. The service groups together all the images it finds of the same face, whether you’ve identified the person by name or done some other organizing manually.

The easiest way to get started is to tap the search bar. At the bottom of the suggested searches is a row of faces, nine circular icons, each with a face that Google found in your archives. To see photos of this face, just tap the icon. Tap the “Show All” link below the row of faces to display the People & Pets page with large square icons for the indexed faces.

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

One problem with Google’s approach: it indexes and aggregates ALL faces on ALL image types in your Google Photos archives. If you take lots of news screenshots, for example, Google Photos indexes those faces alongside those of people you care about. You can edit the faces you see, but this just hides a face instead of removing it.

Google only recently expanded the name of this page to People and 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.