Google has started rolling out a new update that gives its Photos app the ability to recognise the people in your pictures.

It will use machine-learning technology for facial recognition, and prompt you to share your pictures with any friends it manages to detect within them.

The same functionality will apply to any pictures of you that are sitting in your friends’ Google Photos albums.

The app will also know when you and your friends attended the same event, and will encourage all of you to add your pictures to a shared album.

You’ll be able to change the suggested photos and recipients before sharing them, and will be notified when anyone else adds pictures to the collection.

Shared Libraries goes even further, allowing you to share all of your pictures with people you trust, including any new ones that you take.

“Let’s say Daniel wants to share his library with his wife, Leslie. He can share his entire photo library, or just photos of specific people, such as photos of Leslie, or photos of their daughter. He can also give Leslie access only to photos starting from a certain day, such as the day they first met,” Google explains.

“As Daniel takes more photos, they are shared with Leslie automatically. Now Daniel doesn’t have to remember to send photos to Leslie. Google Photos will share them automatically and will notify Leslie when new photos arrive.”

They’re clever uses of artificial intelligence, which a great deal of users will find handy, and provide a glimpse into Google’s AI- focused future plans.

“In an AI-first world, we are rethinking all our products,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai at the most recent I/O conference in May, revealing the company’s plans to use machine-learning to improve everything it does.

It’s also working on a product called Lens, which will give the company greater insight into our daily lives than ever before, turning people’s phone cameras into search engines.