Google Photos now offers better control of your Memories with new ‘Show less’ feature

Summary

• Google Photos now allows users to see less of a person in their Memories.
• The “Show less” feature prevents the individual from appearing in Memories when they are alone in a photo, but may still show up in group photos.
• Users can still choose to “Hide” or “Block” individuals from Memories if they want.

If you’re an Android user, chances are, you’re using Google Photos to manage, edit, and even save all your images and videos to the cloud. It’s a powerful tool that’s only gotten better over time, introducing new features, and with the goal of becoming your one-stop shop for everything photo and video related. And while we’d love to say that all the app’s features are great, some can be hit or miss. Memories was a feature introduced some years back that gave users a way to take a virtual stroll down memory lane. It was quite a clever feature that would allow the app to resurface old photos of people and places, so users could relive their best memories.

However, this feature wasn’t always the beautiful nostalgia trip that Google or its users had hoped for, with Memories sometimes resurfacing some bad times with images of people, places, or even things that maybe weren’t great reminders of one’s past. While it did take some time, Google would eventually introduce a way to customize the Memories experience by blocking people or things that you didn’t want to see. As you can imagine, this was an all or nothing solution that required a huge compromise, and there wasn’t a great middle ground until now. Google Photos is now widely rolling out a feature that will let users see less of a person.

When less is more

You can find the full details of how this feature works through Google’s Help portal, but for the most part, it’s a pretty simple and effective way to really customize the experience more than ever before. In addition to blocking a person or hiding a face, users will now have the option to “show less” of a person. Now, there’s a big distinction between the options which will yield different results.

What’s great about the “show less” option is that you won’t ever see these people included in your Memories when they are the sole person in that photo. But if they happen to be part of a group photo, they could still show up in your Memories. This offers a little more flexibility, and could lead to improved Memories being created that you otherwise would not have seen. Of course, if this still isn’t quite what you’re looking for, you could always just block the person, but you’ll potentially lose out on seeing those group photos.

The option should now be available in the Google Photos app and if you want to give it a try, you can head into the settings menu and locate the option for Memories. From here, you’ll have the option to “Hide faces” but if you look just below that you should see the option where you can 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’ve been meaning to create a better Memories experience, give this option a go.