Google Photos to Get Manual Face Tagging, Timestamp Editing on Android, and Other Useful Features

From manual face tagging to timestamp editing on Android, Google Photos is about to get a lot more powerful.

By Harpreet Singh | Updated: 4 July 2019 16:25 IST

Google Photos to Get Manual Face Tagging, Timestamp Editing on Android, and Other Useful Features

Google Photos will soon let you manually tag faces on your photos

Highlights

Google Photos' head confirmed some upcoming features on Twitter
There's no clear timeline on when these new features will actually ship
Some features that are currently available on the Web will come to mobile

Google Photos lets users back up their library of photos and videos to the cloud, and synchronise them across all their devices. Over the years, Google Photos has become a popular app on both Android and iOS. It does a great job of managing all the media on your devices and offers a bunch of useful features. Backed by Google's machine learning algorithms, Google Photos makes it easier to organise your photos and videos.

On Wednesday, Google Photos' product lead, David Lieb, used some of his downtime and asked users for some feedback about the app. While interacting with other users, Lieb also shared some insights on upcoming features on Google Photos.

He also acknowledged known bugs and talked about performance improvements while interacting with users for several hours on Twitter, as spotted by Android Police.

Hi Twitter! It's no-meetings week at @googlephotos and I've got a couple hours free. Tell me what you want to see next from Google Photos! New features, bug fixes, performance improvements, you name it. (No promises but very open minds!)
— David Lieb (@dflieb) July 2, 2019

Here are all the new, useful features coming to Google Photos:

1. Ability to manually tag a face
Google Photos users will finally be able to manually tag faces on their photos. The feature is said to be in development, and there's no clear timeline on when it'll ship. Currently, Google Photos lets users remove wrongly tagged photos. The app won't even let users pick photos for adding them to a tagged face.

2. Search for recently uploaded photos
There are a few features available on Google Photos for Web that haven't migrated to mobile apps yet. But the Google Photos team is now working to bring some of those to Android and iOS apps. Users will soon be able to search for recently uploaded photos on Google Photos' mobile apps. This feature is currently limited to the Web interface of Photos.

3. Editing timestamps
Another feature that's coming to Google Photos is the ability to edit timestamps directly on the Android version of the app. The feature has been available to Web and iOS users for some time now.

4. Deleting photos
Google Photos' team is also working on letting users delete some photos or videos from their library while they're browsing albums. Users will also be able to tag a photo or video as a favourite within a shared album, apart from liking it.

5. Other notable features coming to Google Photos
Lieb also discussed a bunch of other features briefly during his Twitter interaction. These involved suggestions for feature requests such as easily removing duplicate photos and videos, adding a map functionality, displaying descriptions in slideshows, and more. These still seem like ideas being thrown around and most of these may not make it to the app anytime soon.

While Lieb spent hours talking about Google Photos, he didn't give up any specific timelines for features that were discussed. It's still pretty unclear when some or all of these features will arrive on Google Photos, but it's interesting to see a product lead taking to Twitter to discuss a popular product openly.

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.

Further reading: Google, Google Photos

Harpreet Singh

Email Harpreet

Harpreet is the community manager at Gadgets 360. He loves all things tech, and can be found hunting for good deals when he is not shopping online. He has written about deals and e-commerce in India for many years, as well as covering social media and breaking technology news. More