How to Hide Someone in Google Photos Memories

Google Photos is an amazing app that makes all your media available on your devices and serves as a reliable backup in case, god forbid, your technology goes down. It’s invaluable in many ways, but still prone to being a bit of a pain: it likes to send you push notifications about what you did on a certain day years ago, or create little AI-generated collages of memories. It’s okay if those memories bring you joy, but if seeing someone from your past causes you heartache, that’s a different story. However, you can ask Google Photos to disable this feature. Here’s how.

Prevent Google Photos from showing you a specific person

This works not only for people, but also for pets, so whether you’re mourning a romantic breakup or a dead dog, you can tell Google Photos that it’s time to cut the bullshit and stop playing with your emotions.

In the app, tap your profile picture in the top right corner and select Photo Settings. Under Settings you will find Memories. Click on it. You will be given two options: “Hide People and Pets” and “Hide Dates.” If you select the People and Pets option, you’ll be given a grid of the faces of everyone you’ve photographed in your Google Photos. (This was kind of funny for me since I save a lot of memes and news about celebrities, so I was given the opportunity to hide not only exes and old friends, but also Kim Kardashian and Bernie Sanders.)

When you select one of these faces from the grid, a small peephole with a line through it appears above their photo and also darkens. When you exit the page and return, you will see that these faces have been moved to the bottom of the list and are now greyed out, but they are still available if you ever want to display them from your memories. .

If you want to hide an event, such as an anniversary or something traumatic that you photographed, you will need to use the Hide Dates feature, but keep in mind that this will prevent anything you saved from that day from appearing.

Things to keep in mind

For the most part, the people you hide are presented in order of how many photos of them you have in your storage, so you can scroll around a bit if you want to hide someone you don’t have a ton of photos with. Be prepared if you end up getting a little scared when meeting them.

Additionally, this doesn’t completely hide their photos from your library; it only prevents them from appearing in the memories or ready-made collages the app creates for you. But it works instantly – I hid someone who was in my first suggested memory of the day, and when I came back, the memory had completely disappeared from my list.