How we built Pixel’s Add Me feature for easier group photos

Maayan Rossmann is her family’s de facto photographer, which means she’s missing from a lot of photos. “In Israel, there’s ‘Family Day,’ where kids bring in a family photo at school,” the Pixel camera product manager says. “And it was always hard for me to find one that I was in!”

This experience, of course, isn’t specific to parents; there’s always someone who volunteers to take the pic, or dash for the camera timer or contort their arm to get everyone in the shot. But the plight of the parent behind the lens is a big part of what inspired Pixel’s Add Me feature. Launched at Made by Google in August, Add Me allows you to combine two pictures taken during the same session and in the same scene so everyone — including the person who took the original shot — is in the photo.

Software engineer Adi Zicher had only been on the Creative Camera team for about three weeks in August 2022 before pitching the idea. During a brainstorm session, Adi brought up that someone is always left out of group shots. This resonated with everyone, especially the parents (who, given their day jobs, are often the group photographer).

Development was already underway for the Pixel 8 series, so a feature that addressed this problem wouldn’t be ready in time. But Adi could still chip away at it for the future. “I had a year of working on it solo, and popping into hackathons and stuff, trying to get people to work on it with me,” Adi explains. Towards the end of that year, a mockup of the feature was available, which was also around the time Maayan joined the project. “Maayan took care of making this a reality!” Adi says.

Making Add Me a reality required collaboration between the Pixel Camera, Creative Camera and Google XR teams. (The Google XR team works on Android XR and ARCore, platforms for building augmented and virtual reality experiences.) To blend an image, Add Me uses augmented reality (AR) to show the second photographer an overlay of the first image so they can accurately frame the new photo to match the composition of the first one. Since aligning the two images is crucial to get the best result, the team explored a few methods to get the perfect shot. They eventually realized augmented reality was the most useful way to visually guide the user, so they turned to the Google XR team.

“We on the XR team have always wanted to do more and enable helpful features in the Camera app,” says XR software engineer Ryan DuToit. The team saw the vision for Add Me and recognized how useful it would be for personal photography.

Still, developing an interface where the AR feature was self-explanatory — so even those unfamiliar with the technology could use it — wasn’t easy, and took ample experimentation. Plus, the XR team had a busy 2024, Ryan explains, pointing to the recent Android XR launch. “Collaborating with another team on another project was challenging — but we did it, and I’m very proud of it,” he says.

Add Me was a fairly complicated technical feat: It uses various machine learning models, which are powered by Pixel’s TPU and the Tensor G4 chip to run on device. “If it weren’t for the TPU, I don’t think we would have been able to converge to a reasonable latency,” Adi says. If they’d had to run these ML models on a GPU or CPU, the feature wouldn’t have been able to display the images from the first shot and then later the blended shot quickly enough.

Add Me launched with our Pixel 9 phones and quickly became a popular feature, especially during moments when people tend to gather. "When I look at the photos Googlers share with us, it strikes me how often they use Add Me to capture those special moments with loved ones — family gatherings, vacations, holidays,” Adi says.

And then there’s the whole “twinning with yourself” thing. With Add Me, you can have someone take two photos of you to blend together into interesting, Sci-Fi-esque “twinning” photographs. It’s something the team experimented with a lot — but not for the cool effect.

“We’d take photos duplicating ourselves just because that was easy for testing,” Adi says. But the twinning craze took over the Sandbox demo at Made by Google. “It was one of the first things that people tried with it!” she says.

So whether you want to get in the next family photo or take one with the person you know best — yourself — Add Me can be the perfect tool.