Introduced on the Pixel 4 in 2019, Frequent Faces lets you take better photos of people that you photograph or record the most. It recognizes faces in photos and videos saved on your device and recommends improvements to photos containing people that you often capture. It’s an optional feature that you can enable manually from the main Camera settings. Frequent Faces works entirely on-device, with no face data sent to Google. Disabling the feature will delete any saved data. On the Pixel 6 series, Frequent Faces also helps Google’s Real Tone feature show skin tones more accurately. However, the company quietly disabled Frequent Faces for Pixels in recent months. Reports of the feature missing on the devices have surfaced since at least May this year. Answering a user’s question about why they couldn’t find Frequent Faces in the camera app on their Pixel 6 Pro in May, a Google product expert said, “this feature was temporarily disabled, and a fix for it is forthcoming. There is no time frame on the release yet. I will keep you updated as more information becomes available.” Unfortunately, there has been no update on it for the past couple of months. The feature remained missing while Google continued to advertise it on its websites. The company claims it as a feature on the Pixel 6a product landing page as well as the Google Camera page. All this suggested that Frequent Faces will not be gone forever but there was no telling when it will return. We finally know the wait won’t be much longer now.
Google Camera should regain Frequent Faces soon
In a statement to Android Authority, Google said that it had temporarily disabled Frequent Faces to fix a bug that was “causing issues” in the Camera app. The company didn’t specify the issues but confirmed that the bug has been fixed. It plans to re-enable the feature in a future update for Google Camera. Hopefully, the future update will not take too long to arrive. We will keep a tab on it and let you know when we have more information.
