If you’re a pet owner who uses Google Photos, you’ve probably typed in “dog” or “cat” before in order to surface photos of your furry pal – like anytime someone asks you about your pet, for example, which clearly means they would like to see a picture of Mr. Fluffypants. Today, Google is introducing an easier way to aggregate your pet photos in its Photos app – by allowing you to group all your pet’s photos in one place, right beside the people Google Photos organized using facial recognition.
This is an improvement over typing in “dog,” or another generalized term, because the app will now only group together photos of an individual pet together, instead of returning all photos you’ve captured with a “dog” in them.
And like the face grouping feature, you can label the pet by name to more easily pull up their photos in the app, or create albums, movies or photo books using their pictures.
In addition, Google Photos lets you type in an animal’s breed to search for photos of pets, and it lets you search for photos using the dog and cat emojis. The company also earlier this year introduced a feature that would create a mini-movie starring your pet, but you can opt to make one yourself by manually selecting photos then choosing from a half-dozen tracks to accompany the movie, says Google.
Helping people with their pet photos (and those of kids, we should note) is a big selling point for photo-taking apps and other photography accessories. For instance, Google’s new camera called Clips has been specially designed to automate the process of taking the best photos of children and pets by capturing “motion photos” without sound, then using on-board machine learning algorithms to figure out which are the best images.
Google says the new pet-friendly features in Google Photos will roll out today to most countries worldwide.