Disable Face Detection and Recognition in Windows Photos app

The exclusive Photos App on Microsoft’s Windows 11/10 is the default photo-sharing application that allows users to conveniently view all their stored photos, organize, make minor edits, and even share them with others. This application proved out to be handy and replaced the conventional and popular Windows Photo Viewer application.

Photos app is bundled with excellent features that not only allow the user to store and view their pictures in one place but also organize them into albums that make sorting through easy. This application is tightly integrated with OneDrive cloud; hence, it pulls in all your photos and videos from all your accounts and devices to one single platform. Besides, the app’s built-in capabilities can edit and enhance images, which makes them even more amazing. And the most interesting one the Face Detection and Recognition technology that has the power of identifying people in your photos.

The feature that Microsoft calls ‘People’

The current version of the Photos App on Windows has a feature called People. This feature typically syncs the contact and image information from the People app and further groups the images based on face detection and recognition. In all ways, this feature does sound appealing, but many users consider disabling it a better idea.

You may ask why? The most common reason is that many feel uncomfortable with technology recognizing them instinctively in every photo. Also, the amount of memory the app eats up – this is because the data collected by the Photos app is stored on the user’s local computer.

Disable Face Detection and Recognition in Photos App

If you are not interested in having the face detection and recognition feature in the Photos application enabled, then you can use this tutorial to turn it OFF. Follow these steps to disable Face Detection and Recognition:

1. From the Start Menu, go to the Photos application (Its tile is pinned to the Start menu by default).
2. In the upper-right corner of the Photos app, select See more ‘…’ to view the drop-down menu.
3. Here, select the Settings option.
4. Now, under the Viewing and Editing section, turn the People toggle button Off.
5. Next, confirm your action by hitting Accept.

This will prevent the Photos app from detecting people in your photos in Windows 10. You can now close the application.

If you wish to enable the Face Detection and Recognition feature, simply follow the same process till step ‘4’ and toggle the People button to On.

This way, you can enable or disable face detection and recognition features on the Windows Photos app.

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