Grow-Up Reel › Guides

How to gather every photo of one person in Google Photos

Published 2026-10-25

If your photos live in Google Photos, the quickest route to a grow-up reel is the website on a computer: it can select hundreds of photos in a few clicks and download them as originals, with the date each one was taken.

On a computer (photos.google.com)

1. Go to photos.google.com and click the search bar. Faces you've labelled appear as round thumbnails; click the person. You can also type their name.
2. Scroll to the oldest photo you want. Hover over it and click the tick in its corner.
3. Scroll to the newest photo you want, hold Shift and click its tick. Everything in between is selected.
4. Untick any photos where the face is hidden, tiny or turned away.
5. Open the three-dot menu at the top right and choose Download. Several photos arrive as a ZIP file.
6. Open the ZIP so you have a normal folder, then drag the folder onto Grow-Up Reel.

Downloaded photos are the originals, so their dates come with them and the reel puts them in order by itself.

On a phone

1. In the Google Photos app, tap Search, then the person's face.
2. Long-press a photo, then drag across others to select a run of them.
3. Add them to a new album with Add to, so they're easy to find again.
4. Open Grow-Up Reel, tap Choose photos and pick them. Depending on your phone, the picker shows your Google Photos albums directly; if it doesn't, select the album's photos in Google Photos and choose Download first, then pick them from your device.

If face groups are missing

Google Photos only shows people if face grouping is turned on, and it isn't offered in every country or region. Without it, search by year or place ("2015", "beach") and pick photos by hand. Grow-Up Reel finds the faces in whatever you give it.

Very large libraries

For hundreds of photos across many years, Google Takeout can export a whole album at once. It's slower to prepare, but it gives you every original in one go.