Tagging with Photos

Melissa loves her family and friends, and she loves taking pictures of them at parties, reunions, and whenever the opportunity presents itself. Now she has amassed a large number of photos on her computer. The problem she runs into is keeping track of all the people and who is in each photo. Fortunately for Melissa, she uses the Photos app in Windows 10, and she can have it do some of the work for her.

The Photos app offers the ability to tag people in your photos. By using facial-detection algorithms, Photos goes through your collection of images and scans the faces and tries its best, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), to group images based on the person in the photograph. Then you are able to give each person a name and then go in and look at the pictures that the Photos app has tagged people in. To use this feature, follow these steps:

1. Launch the Photos app by pressing the Windows Key and typing (without quotes) "Photos" and press Enter. You can also choose Photos from the Start menu. Either method will start the Photos app.
2. At the top of the Photos app select the People tab. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The People tab of the Photos app.

3. You need to let Photos access your contacts. Do this by clicking on the "Start Tagging" button.
4. Windows displays a prompt asking you to confirm that you want to allow access. Click "Yes." The prompt closes, and you now see the faces with the words "Add Name" under each face followed by the number of photos of that person.
5. Click on "Add Name" under the picture of the person that you want to label. The Photos app then displays a pop-up for you to add the name of the person. (See Figure 2.)



Figure 2. Adding the name for a person.

6. Repeat step 5 for each person that you want to name.

As you can see in Figure 1, the Photos app broke my daughter's pictures into three groups. After completing step 5 for the first set, if I click on the second set I will be asked if I want to merge the photos. If I wanted them merged, I would click "Yes" and continue naming the different people. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3. Merging people.

When you first use the People feature of the Photos app it will appear that the program is not detecting all of the faces. For example, my son was only detected in 55 of the 64 photos at first. The same happened with my wife's photos, with only 45 of the 65. As Photos AI works on the images it will start to detect more faces in the images. Hopefully, as updates come along the facial-recognition algorithms will improve, and we will receive the option to manually tag photos that the AI missed, an option that is not currently available. Also, facial recognition only works when there are multiple images of the same person, which allows the program's AI to start detecting similar facial traits.

With the People feature of the Photos app, you can quickly start finding photos of your favorite people and help keep your photos organized a bit better.

 This tip (13711) applies to Windows 10.