Guide to enable face recognition in the new Google Photos in Nokia phones

The latest Nokia phones from HMD Global be it Nokia 7 plus or upcoming phones are adopting the Android bandwagon to give the best features to Nokia users. The use of Google’s new stock versions of Android, Android One and Android Go, on all of Nokia devices brings Google designed software experience to the Nokia phones alongwith easy to use interface and a curated set of pre-installed apps, and free, unlimited high quality photos storage with Google Photos. Also Nokia devices now brings in regular security and OS upgrades and features the latest Google innovations.

Google Photos as facial recognition

Facial recognition is available inside Android, iPhone, iPad and the web version of Google Photos but if you are not seeing it in your Google account yet, it is probably because you are accessing Photos from outside the United States. The new Google Photos features, on the other hand, appear to allow you to share your facial recognition data so that other users will see your face automatically tagged in their own photos without having to go through any sort of naming process themselves.

In this way, if enough people enable the feature, shared photos will become automatically tagged and marked for sharing to those people without user intervention. Google is even now using facial recognition technology to identify people’s pets which means Google Photos, can now automatically recognise pets via their faces, it announced in a blog post — letting users search for their pets by name.

Google Photos is known for its use of AI to analyse the subject of users’ photos. Search for “beach,” and it will return you your holiday snaps; search “burger” and it’ll show you all your savoury meals at McDonald’s.

How to enable face recognition in the new Google Photos in Nokia phones

If you in Australia you need to enable this feature on your Nokia phones or any other Android mobiles. This enabling will hardly take a minute or two to get started.

As a first step you’ll need a VPN to enable a connection to the US. The easiest way to do this is using Tunnelbear. It’s free, and it works for this purpose. If you’re a subscriber to other VPN products like bettenet or PureVPN then that will work perfectly well also.

So you can download the free VPN from google play store on your Nokia Android

Next you need to wipe your Photos settings. The easiest way to do this is as follows:

Simply go into Settings > Apps > Photos

Wait for it to load the data usage figures and now Click the ‘Clear Data’ button

This simply removes the app’s settings and data on your phone. You won’t lose any photos.

Now connect your VPN, and make sure you specify an endpoint in the US. Most VPN software for Android makes this really easy. So like at setting in TunnelBear you need to be sure that  it says United States at the bottom.

Now click on Connect (he slide button at the top of the screen and it’ll connect up to the US VPN. It’ll take a moment or two to establish, and you’ll have to click OK to an acknowledgement prompt.

When you click OK and it’ll be done and you’re connected.

Once the VPN is active, you need to go back into the Photos app. You’ll be presented with the setup/intro wizard again. Just click through all this and be sure to turn on automatic photo backup.

You don’t actually have to, but it’s easier to enable it now than to enable it later via settings.

Now after the the setup wizard, you’ll be at the normal photos landing screen.

Simply open the side navigation menu, click settings, and then enable the new ‘Group Similar Faces’ option.

When you’ve done that, you’ll have access to view faces in the search option. Just hit the blue magnifying glass icon on the photo screen  and then you’ll see all the faces Google has recognised from your photo library.

Remember that this is a one time process only; once you’ve activated the feature, you won’t need to use the VPN again, and better yet, it enables the feature on every device you use, including the web-app.