Summary
- Google Photos now allows users to see less of a person in their Memories.
- The Show Less feature will prevent the person from appearing in Memories if they are alone in a photo, but they can still appear in group photos.
- Users can still “hide” or “block” individuals from reminders if needed.
If you’re an Android user, you probably use Google Photos to manage, edit, and even store all your images and videos in the cloud. It’s a powerful tool that has gotten better over time, introducing new features, and aims to become your one-stop shop for everything photo and video related. And while we’d love to say that all of the app’s features are great, some of them can be a gamble. Memories was a feature introduced a few years ago that gave users the ability to take a virtual walk down memory lane. It was a pretty clever feature that allowed the app to resurface old photos of people and places, allowing users to relive their fondest memories.
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However, this feature wasn’t always the beautiful nostalgia trip that Google or its users had hoped for. Sometimes, Memories would revisit bad times with pictures of people, places, or even things that might not have been fond memories from one’s past. While it took some time, Google eventually introduced a way to customize the Memories experience by blocking people or things you didn’t want to see. As you can imagine, this was an all-or-nothing solution that required a big compromise, and until now, there wasn’t a happy middle ground. Google Photos is now introducing a feature that lets users see less of a person.
When less is more
You can find detailed information on how this feature works on Google’s help portal, but overall it’s a pretty simple and effective way to customize the experience more than ever. In addition to blocking a person or hiding a face, users now have the option to “show less” a person. Now there’s a big difference between the options that leads to different results.
The great thing about the “Show Less” option is that if they’re the only person in the photo, you’ll never see those people in your memories. However, if they’re part of a group photo, they can still appear in your memories. This offers a little more flexibility and can lead to creating enhanced memories that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Of course, if that’s still not quite what you’re after, you can always just block the person, but then you might miss out on the opportunity to see those group photos.
The option should be available in the Google Photos app now. If you want to try it out, you can go into the settings menu and find the Memories option. From here, you have the “Hide faces” option, but if you look just below that, you should see the option that lets you add people to “show less of them.” We were able to spot it in Google Photos version 6.94.0.659749309 and it shouldn’t be dependent on the version you have, so if you want to create a better Memories experience, give this option a try.
