How to activate facial recognition in Google Photos
In the US, Google Photos users have an easier time organizing photos of people than we do. In the American country, Google is allowed to facially recognize people and group them into the same album, so that we can later share them with them or, simply, to have all our images better organized. What happens in Europe? That Google has preferred to ignore this function for reasons of privacy laws.
One thing to note about this function.Google does not 'recognize' faces, that is, it is unable (yet) to say to which contact the person you have taken in your photo belongs to. Of course, until you tell him who he is. At that time, if you have facial recognition activated, Google Photos will be able to tell you who is in the photo and group all their images into an album. He will be able to do it even with our pets.
But of course, we are not in the United States. What should we do, then, for the function to appear? Well, very easy. We will have to download an application that 'fools' our Google Photos and makes it believe that we are actually in the United States and not in Spain. A very useful application for this is Tunnelbear, free but with paid functions (which we will not need for our purpose) and whose installation file has a weight of 16 MB.
For your mobile to detect that we are, apparently, in the United States, all we have to do is install and open the Tunnelbear application. To be able to use it, we have to create a account with our email address By default, when we open it for the first time, the North American country will appear and we will simply have to turn on the switch. Now, all we have to do is open the Google Photos application to activate facial recognition, which we now have available.
We open the Google Photos application and we are going to focus on the three-line hamburger menu that we have in the upper left part of the screen. Press it and a side screen will open where we will have to click on 'Settings'.
Once inside the settings, we have to click on the new option that will have appeared, 'Group similar faces'.On this screen we will activate the 'Group by faces' switch, we will assign a face with a personal label and, in addition, we will be able to choose if we want Google Photos to recognize us more easily in the photos of our contacts so that we can see it later, if you share them with us. Finally, we can also decide if we want to group our pets as if they were people.
Now let's see how the face album has been created. We are going to look at the bottom bar of the screen, where we can see several sections: 'Photos', 'Albums', 'Assistant' and 'Share'. Click on the 'Albums' section. At the top of the screen we have several albums created, both by default by the application and by us. One of these albums must be 'People and pets'. If we enter the album we can share the 'faces' with their owners in the 'Share as an album' section or a particular photograph.
