How to hide Memories of certain people, pets, and dates in Google Photos

Sometimes you'd rather not reminisce

Google Photos is a legitimately life-changing service for those of us who take a bunch of pictures: it's never been so easy to store, organize, and share snapshots of our lives. A feature called Memories aims to highlight your best shots from yesteryear, but Photos has no way of knowing which memories you'd actually like to relive. Fortunately, you can tweak the experience to exclude people, pets, or dates you don't want to see right now with just a few taps. Here's how.

To customize your Memories, open the Google Photos app, tap your profile picture in the top right corner, then Photos settings.

From here, tap Memories. The Hide people & pets option will take you to a grid of the people and animals Google Photos has collections of. Select the ones you don't want to see in future Memories; the ones you hide will be denoted by an icon of a crossed-out eye. You can unhide them at any time by repeating the process.

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Hiding faces will not only stop them showing up in new Memories, but also keep those people (or pets) out of your search results.

Hide dates is even simpler: tap Add dates, then enter the date or range you don't want to get Memories for — to hide a single day, select it for both the start and end date. All the dates you've disallowed will populate a list under the Hide dates menu option, and you can remove them whenever you want to allow Memories from those dates again.

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Unlike faces, photos from the dates you add to this list will still show up in your searches.

As our increasingly digital lives generate increasingly thorough records of our goings-on, things can get messy, and there are plenty of reasons you might not want to be reminded of certain people, pets, or periods of time. Luckily, as you can see, Google Photos makes it pretty easy to opt out of those unwanted reminders.

About The Author

Taylor Kerns (1102 Articles Published)

Taylor was a phone nerd long before joining Android Police in 2018. He currently carries a Pixel 5, which he uses mostly to take pictures of his dogs.

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