Microsoft has updated its Photos application beyond the Fall Creators Update version with new A.I.-powered functionality. It is now able to identify individual people across your entire collection of images, making it easier to categorize shots by their content and create customized slideshows of pictures with a particular person as their focus.
Automated face tagging has been a feature on sites like Facebook for some time now. While that is usually for the purpose of highlighting photos to their subjects, the new update to Microsoft’s Photos app is aimed at those making story videos with a focus on certain people in them. Photos can now let you select individual people to highlight, bringing images where those people are the focus to the fore.
That feature is in turn designed to augment the slideshow video function of the Photos app, which was originally Microsoft’s Story Remix stand-alone program. You can now select the photos you want in the video, the style and tone of it, what music to use as a backdrop and the “star” of the film. The story will then focus on them.
“With today’s update, you can take your filmmaking to the next level by selecting yourself or nominating someone to be the star in your automatically generated creation,” Microsoft said in a blog post. “The new feature allows you to follow your child across the field in a montage of their soccer game, or highlight a friend at their birthday party reel. You can also choose yourself and start working on your award acceptance speech.”
Once you’re done making your homage to your child’s success or your own demo reel, you can share it straight to social media right from within the updated Photos app.
To take advantage of the new Photos app features, all you need to do is run the latest version of Windows 10 with the Fall Creators Update installed. Photos itself is a free application included with Windows 10.
Fall Creators Update also introduced a more fluid aesthetic to the Windows 10 operating system in the form of the “Fluent Design” update (previously known as Project Neon) as well as an overhauled Edge browser.
