Joe Maring / Android Authority

TL;DR

• Google Photos has new search shortcuts to people and pets on Android and iOS.
• The new option requires having the Face Groups feature enabled.
• We previously saw that this feature was in development in July, and it’s now rolling out broadly.

Google’s made it even easier to find pictures of people in the Google Photos app. Photos has always offered an optional feature called Face Groups that groups similar faces together, creating automatically updating albums of all your pictures of any given person or pet, and today, Google announced that that feature is being more directly integrated into the app’s search functions.

The change was quietly announced this morning by Google in a help forum post. Now, if you have Face Groups enabled, both Ask Photos and the app’s “classic search” feature prominently display a row of faces. Tapping any of the pictures in that row will take you to all the photos you have of that person or pet. We first caught a glimpse of this feature in an APK teardown back in July, and today, the change seems to be rolling out broadly.

The new Face Groups integration does seem to work a bit differently depending on the type of search function you have access to. In Ask Photos (the experience most users will have by now), the new row of faces doesn’t appear on the Ask tab until you tap the search bar. On the older Search tab, though, the new shortcuts should appear near the top of the screen right away.

You’ve always been able to search for pictures of any person you’ve assigned a name to by entering their name into the Google Photos’s search bar, but these new Face Groups shortcuts speed things up and feel right at home integrated into the search interface. If you use Face Groups in Google Photos, you should see the new shortcuts on your own devices starting today.

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