Google has issued an apology after a man took to Twitter to show the company's new photo app had added photos of his dark-skinned friend to an album tagged "gorillas".

Jacky Alcine, a US computer programmer, was outraged to see the racially charged term appear in the app, which uses face and object recognition software to tag and sort photos automatically.

"Y'all f...ed up": Jacky Alcine's tweet shows selfies with his friend automatically sorted into a folder tagged "Gorillas". Credit:twitter.com/jackyalcine

To prove it wasn't a once-off error, Alcine also tweeted a screenshot showing every image of his friend was being added to the folder, and suggested the reference images Google had collected did not have black people in mind.

"This is how you determine someone's target market", he tweeted.