Google Photos

Google Photos can recognize people from the back in some cases [Gallery]

Ben Schoon | Jun 8 2023 - 7:51 am PT

Google Photos is a very impressive app and useful service for a number of reasons, not least of which is its excellent facial recognition for grouping photos. Suddenly, though, Google Photos is somehow able to recognize people from the back, which is super useful, but also super confusing.

As spotted by the folks over at Android Authority, Google Photos has recently picked up the ability to recognize people from the back, without their face being clearly visible.

The outlet’s Rita El Khoury found that her husband was recognized by Photos where he was facing completely away from the camera, with his face not visible at all. Google Photos was, somehow, recognizing him and automatically tagging him as the subject of these photos, and with a level of accuracy too. It was also being applied to photos that had been uploaded both recently and years prior.

It doesn’t seem to work 100% of the time, though, with manual tagging still available. It’s also brought out that in many cases Photos will show the recognized face as “available to add” rather than just adding it fully. And, in a lot of cases, it still just fails entirely.

I was able to replicate this with at least two photos of my wife, which also helped reveal how the app might be doing this.

From what I can tell, and Rita brings out the same idea, this seems to be based on context. Photos will tag the “face” appropriately based on the context of other photos in the same setting or clothing where the face is visible. In the case with my wife, the photos that worked were taken around the same time as photos were I could also see her face.

*Google Photos seems to have used the context of the first photo to assign the second one*

While this doesn’t seem to be working across the board, it’s certainly a helpful little tweak. Are you seeing Google Photos recognize subjects from the back? Let us know in the comments!