There are scores offile manager apps on Android, but more often than not, we snap photos of documents to digitize them for convenient sharing and storage. That’s perhaps why popular keyboard apps likeGboard integrated optical character recognition(OCR) capabilities recently. But that doesn’t help manage your gallery app filled with the shots of receipts you wanted to split, notes you borrowed from a friend, or recipes you spotted online. Google Photos deploys AI to assist with automatic categorization, but that’s not spot-on every time. Now, we have our first detailed look at the upcoming manual categorization override feature.
Google Photos may finally let you fix its bad auto-categorization
Manual recategorization for documents is in the pipeline
Google Photos has offered automatic categorization of images featuring documents, IDs, receipts, menus, and other printed text. The system leverages AI and ML for automatically filing relevant images under categories such as Screenshots, Books & magazines, Event information, Identity, Notes, Payment methods, Receipts, Recipes & menus. You can look up images from what’s written in the photographed document as well, but incorrect categorization can get annoying quickly, even though it is automated.
Earlier this year, Google app feature spotter @AssembleDebug on X (formerly Twitter) uncovered ongoing development of amanual categorization override systemwhere you could re-file images into the correct category album, even in bulk. The first sighting left a lot of questions about the final implementation unanswered, but the researcher now shares additional screenshots revealing how easy to use the system is (viaSmartDroid).
Any auto-classified image should feature a chip in the upper left corner mentioning the category it is filed under. Once the feature is live, recategorization should be as simple as tapping this chip, selectingChange categoriesfrom the menu that appears, and then selecting all the categories that apply from a list. Once you’re done, you can save the reassignments using theSavebutton in the upper right corner. The chip’s menu also features a helpful option to view the tagged category, offering another way to find other instances of the AI’s misidentification.
While this early preview of the feature reveals that you’ll be allowed to select multiple tags for an image to make it more searchable, it still leaves some ambiguity about how bulk recategorization would work. However, we are hopeful the wait is a short one, because the menus seem to work as intended, indicative of readiness for release.
