Both Apple (which introduced it with iOS 10), as well as Facebook and Google Photos currently have a function that has turned the social network and the photo galleries of Apple and Google into authentic souvenir factories to remind us of past moments. You know, “such a day as today, X years ago …”.
Unfortunately, their algorithms are not yet able to distinguish the memories that we prefer not to bring back to our mind and, sometimes, they can show us sad moments of our life or stories that are better to forget, such as the death of a relative or old photos with your ex. To avoid this, Apple Photos, Google Photos and Facebook offer tools that allow us to manage the “memories” that we will see in each of their applications. Or directly disable them. Let’s see how it’s done.
How to turn off Facebook memories
Although Facebook introduced the “Such a day as today” feature in 2015 (now it’s called “Memories”), it took several months for it to add the ability to filter people or dates. To access it, you must do the following:
Enter the menu, whose icon is in the upper right in Android or in the lower right in iOS.
Click on the section “Memories” and tap the Settings icon.
In addition to choosing how often you want to receive notifications (once a day, only highlights or never), you can also filter the memories what do you want to see. To do this, in the “Hide memories” section, tap on “People” to hide memories that include certain contacts or on “Dates” to avoid seeing a specific day or period.
How to turn off Google Photos memories
Google added the “Memories” feature to Google Photos in 2019, and like Facebook, it also offers options to hide people, pets, or past event dates in its mobile app. To do this, once inside the Google Photos app, follow the following steps:
Playing profile picture of your account that you will find in the upper right corner.
Click on the option “Photo Settings” on Android or “Google Photos Settings” on iOS.
Enter the “Memories” section to manage the ones you want to see
There you can “Hide people and pets” selecting the faces of those you prefer not to see in your memories or the names of the faces that Google Photos automatically recognizes and classifies. If you prefer “Hide dates”, you just have to select the day or days that you want to disappear.
Also, you can do stop Google Photos notifying you on some or all of the memories by tapping on “Notifications”. On the next page, within the “Memories” section, simply deactivate the three available options: memories from previous years, thematic memories and creations.
How to turn off Apple Photos Memories on iOS
Although one of the novelties that iOS 15 will bring is greater control in the ‘Moments’ function of Photos, we will explain the options currently offered by iOS 14:
If the Photos app shows you a memory that you prefer to avoid, press and hold the video or photo and touch the button “Suggest fewer memories like this” below the image. Of course, keep in mind that iOS 14 does not offer options to exclude certain people or dates from its Memories feature.
You can too enter the section “For you” that you will find at the bottom of the screen. There, among the many memories, find the photo or video that you don’t want to see and press and hold to get the same menu and choose “Suggest fewer memories like this.”
If you directly want to prevent Photos from notifying you of new Memories, enter Settings> Notifications> Photos> Memories and uncheck “Allow notifications”. Just keep in mind that if you’ve added the Photos widget to your iPhone’s home screen, the images from your Featured Memories collection may also appear there.
To remove a specific memory from the list, touch and hold until a menu appears, where you must select “Remove from featured photos”.