Tag Your Photos to Make Friends, Family Easy to Find

How it works with Google Photos

• On a computer, click the search bar at photos.google.com and a group of thumbnails shows up with your most commonly photographed people. To search for specific people, either click one of the thumbnails or See all people below and sift through those phases.

Those faces may be already automatically tagged. Click the image you want, and Google directs you to Add a Name. Do so, and they are now tagged.

• In the smartphone app, click the People & Pets section, and the same group of thumbnails will pop up. To add ones who aren’t tagged, scroll down and click a face.

As it does on the computer, Google instructs you to Add a name. Type it in, and the contact is now tagged.

Clicking the search bar at photos.google.com will show you a group of thumbnails with your most commonly photographed people.

Google

How it works with Amazon Photos

• A $139 annual Prime subscription offers free tagging for members along with unlimited photo storage and shipping and entertainment. Start with photos.amazon.com on your computer.

You may need to register and sign up if you haven’t already. If you’re not a Prime member, Amazon charges $19.99 a year to use its app, including 100 gigabytes of storage.

Click the People section in the left-hand menu, and you’ll see a row of faces in thumbnails. Amazon may automatically tag people in frequent photos. For those the artificial intelligence (AI) doesn’t recognize, it asks “Who’s This?”

Click the face you want to tag. A pop-up window instructs you to name the person. Once stored, the person can be found in searches.

• The Amazon Photos smartphone app has sections devoted to Years, People and Memories. As on the desktop, untagged people are in circle thumbnails. Click on the faces you want to tag, name them and Amazon displays the same pop-up window letting you know they are being renamed.

Amazon, Apple and Google also say they can search for places and things, which don’t need to be tagged. The companies use AI and the location data generated when we snap the photos to figure them out. However, the tools are not as accurate as tagging for people.

What about privacy?

Worried that posting photos of your vacation trip to Bermuda will result in Google ads for all things Bermuda showing up in your Gmail and elsewhere on Google? The company’s chief executive says that won’t happen.

“We don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content — such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos — for advertising purposes, period,” says Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet.

Amazon, Apple and Google all say their facial recognition features are private. For instance, Google says its face technology is “private to each account and not shared across accounts,” “only visible to you,” and not shared across its network.

Amazon reminds that photos are private until they are shared. Apple says its Photos app uses machine learning to organize photos on your device, as opposed to the cloud, “so you don’t need to share them with Apple or anywhere else.”

But if you’re worried about privacy and don’t trust the companies’ statements, you have one clear way to make sure they don’t do anything with your photos: Don’t share photos from the app. Download them and share them outside of the programs, in email or a text.