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How to use Guided Frame on a Pixel phone
Are you having trouble capturing people within the frame when shooting an image with your Pixel phone? Google has introduced Guided Frame, a new feature that helps you position faces correctly when capturing an image. We’re here to tell you all about it, so keep reading for all the goodies.
Read more: Other great Pixel-only features you should know about
QUICK ANSWER
To use Guided Frame on a Pixel phone you have to turn on TalkBack first. Go to Settings > Accessibility > TalkBack, and toggle Use TalkBack on. Go through the TalkBack tutorial and then open the Camera app. Guided Frame will be automatically turned on. Follow instructions to take a photo using Guided Frame.
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What is Guided Frame on Pixel?
Guided Frame is a new Pixel feature, introduced with the Pixel 7 series. It guides the user through taking a selfie with a perfectly framed face. Guided Frame will recognize faces and tell you (through audio) whether to move the camera further, closer, to the left, to the right, up, or down. When your face is perfectly framed, it will begin a timer to shoot the photo, and it will audibly describe every action and step of the way to you.
Guided Frame is part of Google’s TalkBack mode, which provides a speech and gesture-based form of navigation for your phone. The mode and feature are meant for the visually impaired, and it is part of the Accessibility settings. Such users might have trouble taking the right photo, making TalkBack an essential feature for many. That said, anyone can take advantage of it, and Guided Frame is actually a pretty cool feature, even to those who can see perfectly.
There’s a bit of a learning curve to TalkBack, though. The phone changes to a different style of gesture navigation. And then a voice will be telling you every single thing that happens with the phone. You’ll hear a voice telling you when the phone is off, when it’s back on, what you can do to enter apps, which app or option is highlighted, and more.
How to enable TalkBack
Are you ready to give Guided Frame a try? The feature is a bit hard to find, but we’ll tell you exactly where to find it.
- Open the Settings app.
- Go into Accessibility.
- Tap on TalkBack.
- Toggle on the Use TalkBack option.
The system will take you through a guided tutorial on how to use TalkBack mode. We advise that you go through it and learn to use this mode. The new gesture system can get very confusing at first, so it’s best to be ready.
How to take a picture using Guided Frame
Once TalkBack is active, simply open the Camera app. You can use the camera switch button to shoot a selfie. Once the camera recognizes a face, it will start guiding you to frame the photo correctly. The voice will use actual speech and tell you what to do. It might tell you to move the phone closer or further. It will also let you know if you should point the camera up, down, to the left, or to the right.
When the faces are framed correctly, Guided Frame will tell you it’s “ready for selfie,” and start a three-second countdown. The image will be taken automatically, and you’ll be notified with a “photo taken” announcement.
FAQs
Guided Frame is only available on the Pixel 7 series so far.
Google hasn’t announced the introduction of Guided Frame to other devices, so we can’t say for sure when (or if) other devices will get the feature.
Guided Frame turns on/off along with TalkBack. You can follow the same steps in this article and toggle off the feature. Google claims you can also press both Volume buttons simultaneously for a few seconds to turn off TalkBack, but we couldn’t get that to work during our testing. There’s also a shortcut you can use to turn Guided Frame on or off. You can find it in Settings > Accessibility > TalkBack > TalkBack shortcut.
While Guided Frame is a handy feature, and TalkBack can be cumbersome to those who don’t need it, the only way to currently use Guided Frame is to turn on TalkBack. You can, however, turn Guided Frame off without turning TalkBack off. There is a toggle in the Camera settings.