How to find your photos in a shared event folder

After a wedding, a bar mitzvah or a conference, the photos usually arrive as one link: a Google Drive folder or a Google Photos album with hundreds of pictures. Here is how to get just the ones you're in.

Why it's slow by hand

An event folder often has 500 to 2,000 photos. Scrolling through all of them on a phone takes a long time, and it's easy to miss a photo where you're in the background of someone else's moment.

Google Drive can't search a folder by face. Google Photos groups faces in your own library, but not in an album someone else shared with you, unless you first save every photo in it to your library.

Find them with a selfie

1. Copy the link to the photos from the group chat or the email. A Google Drive folder, a Google Photos shared album and an iCloud shared album from an iPhone all work.
2. Open That’s Me and paste it. You'll see right away whether the link can be searched.
3. Take a selfie, facing the camera in good light. A second one from another angle helps.
4. Get your photos: only the ones you're in, best ones first. Save them all to your phone at once, or download them as one ZIP file on a computer.

Nobody signs up: not you, and not whoever shared the photos. The first search on a big folder takes a few minutes while the photos are scanned. Everyone after you gets an answer in seconds.

Looking for your kids too?

Add a photo of each child to the same search, up to four people in all. You'll see who is in which photo, and can show one person's photos at a time. Search only for yourself, for people who agreed, or for your own children.

If the link doesn't work

• The folder is private. The owner shared it with specific people only. That’s Me gives you a ready-made WhatsApp message asking them to open it to anyone with the link. Here's how they do it.
• It's a link to a single photo. Ask for the link to the whole folder or album.
• It's an album in your own Google Photos. Open the album, tap Share, and copy the link from there.

What happens to your selfie

Your selfie is compared with the photos in memory and then discarded. It is never stored. Copies of the event photos are deleted within 24 hours. Read the privacy details.