Google Photos' pets recognition is terribly broken, confuses humans with animals (and that's just tip of iceberg)

Instead of mending the long-broken facial recognition/face tagging feature, the Google Photos team chose to incorporate the ability to recognize faces of pets. While the new functionality did grab a lot good press and feedback initially, it’s when people actually started using it they realized how terribly broken the feature is.

Juggling through some of the pictures in Google Photos on one of our own devices (an iPhone 6S Plus), we ended up uncovering that the app was throwing pictures of humans when asked for those of pets. Really? See for yourself:

Yes, the highlighted images are of a photo-frame containing a lady’s face. Baffled? Well it’s just the beginning. We thought of digging deep to check how the much hyped pet recognition feature was treating other users, and were not astonished to see the complaints pouring in on different help forums as well as Twitter.

To categorize, some of the other problems that we could discover are as follows:

• Pictures of pets aren’t shared when using ‘Shared Library’
• Incorrect identifications or wrong grouping
• No ‘People and Pets’, only ‘People’ section
• The feature is not working properly or as intended

Lets take up each concern case-by-case.

Shared Library doesn’t support sharing pictures of pets

Some of the users put across on the official Photos forum that on sharing their Photos library with a partner, the option to share pictures of pets is a no show. After the problem was highlighted, experts (top contributors on Google Photos Help Forum) also confirmed that currently the feature is missing.

Take a look at what different experts said while addressing the matter in question:

Incorrect identifications

Some of the Photos app users are chiming – both on Twitter as well as the official help forums – that the functionality is either wrongly identifying/mis-categorizing (different pets in one pet face group) or not identifying all their pets. And worse, not even letting them correct it manually.

https://twitter.com/googlephotos/status/930082149922955264
https://twitter.com/KieferCat/status/934697470025719808
https://twitter.com/TIBoine/status/935104662021210112
https://twitter.com/MirrorTorrent/status/926189791237906432

No ‘People and Pets’ section in app, only ‘People’

There are also many users who say that there is no section named ‘People and Pets’ in their app. All they see is the ‘People’ section that still shows only human faces.

We can confirm this issue with our app as well. See the following screenshots comparing what we see (left) and what Google officially said (right) we will see when the feature arrives:

Before you say the functionality might not have arrived for us yet, it’s confirmed that we already have the pets feature, as the app on our phone has the toggle to turn on/off pets recognition in Settings.

Feature not working properly or as intended

Apart from the aforementioned irregularities, in some of the cases the feature is not working properly or has stopped working.

https://twitter.com/puddingenie/status/933970947773739008
https://twitter.com/YaGillyMonsta/status/930270492610744320
https://twitter.com/dartdog/status/935310153708179457
https://twitter.com/eric01406/status/929000469158080512

To conclude, based on our investigation, it won’t be a stretch to say that Google Photos’ pet recognition feature is out of order. With so many different issues being reported, and none of them addressed by the company officially, those affected currently have no other option, but to wait. We hope the company will take notice of these existing glitches, and fix them sooner than later.

Google Photos Help Forum 1 2 3 4 5 6 | Reddit

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