Google Photos has become, over the years, one of the star services of the search engine company. Much of this success is due to the fact that, for years, Google allowed unlimited uploading of photos from smartphones to the service, as long as it was done through the Android or iOS app. Thus, for years many users took advantage of this service and unlimited storage to manage their huge collections of images.
If we stop to think about it for a moment, It is scary to imagine the amount of space that Google would end up dedicating, over the years, to all the free storage you offered in Google Photos. Thus, and although it was a shame for its many users, Google understandably announced at the end of 2020 that unlimited free photo storage would end in June 2021. That was the case and, since then, the only way to have a huge Photo collection in Google Photos is, of course, going through the box, although it is true that this gives access to other very interesting functions, such as the ineffable Magic Eraser, or the even more amazing Magic Editor presented by the company in the past Google I /O 2023.
Without being a novelty, one of the functions most valued by users of services such as Google Photos and the like, is facial recognition to identify people that appear in a photo. This function allows us, practically automatically, to have grouped all those shots in which a certain person appears. It is true that sometimes erroneous identifications occur, and that sometimes a face is not identified, but with the evolution of this technology that happens less and less, and correcting those minimal errors is something that we can solve in an instant, faced with the huge amount of time we would have to spend if we had to manually edit each one.
With the knowledge of the value that users attach to this function, it seems that Google has decided to take a surprising step further. Thus, as we can read in PhoneArena, Google Photos is learning to identify people who appear from behind. For this purpose, and although Google has not yet officially clarified it, the system could be using the context of the image, together with other shots that have been taken at that very moment.
Although it seems that the system still makes mistakes, in some tests carried out by several users the result has been positive. And, in any case, in this situation, Google Photos does not automatically assign the label that identifies that person appears in that image, but rather shows it as a suggestion, so that we can indicate whether it is correct or not.
