Going Beyond Face Detection in Apple Photos
PEOPLE & PETS GOT REALLY, REALLY GOOD WHEN WE WEREN'T LOOKING
If there is a single takeaway from the new release of Apple Photos, it’s that the way we find our pictures just changed. In a big way.
Photo organizing has been built on the concept of a digital filing cabinet since floppy disks were really floppy, and the date the photo was taken is the atomic particle that uniquely identifies every digital image. Even when it’s wrong.
The point, of course, is that organizing our photos is just the setup to finding them as quickly as we can. Particularly important at social gatherings, kindergarten events, and milestone celebrations. Chronology has always been the most obvious marker to search on.
. . . the way we find our pictures just changed
But as photos are distilled memories, and our memories are wildly random, in our mind, a photo’s date is often less memorable than the subject or the experience when we go to find it.
Ask anyone who’s swiped through hundreds of photos at lunch to find their child doing their first backflip on the balance beam. Who remembers when that was? Searching on the child would be the logical move. Except that without a clear face, they wouldn’t be identified.
Until now.
The new Apple Photos offers several shortcuts to search success but the most striking “under the hood” change I’ve found so far is the quantum leap in People & Pets identification. If you haven’t tried it recently, you owe it to yourself to find it, right below Albums on the Photos Home Screen and try it now.
I’ve always considered People & Pets to be just a broad label for what other developers called face detection. I’ve added people tags, merged duplicate ID’s, and ‘trained’ the feature religiously over the years to get a thorough, accurate collection of friends, family, and, more recently, our pets. It’s always been pretty good, but like setting up facial recognition to unlock your iPhone, it was not totally reliable back in the day. So I’ve always considered People & Pets a supporting feature; not the “go to” place for a quick, reliable search on a budding gymnast.
Well, color me surprised.
Whether the result of improved face detection, A.I. (Apple Intelligence), macOS software tweaks, Apple Silicon, object recognition or the combination of it all, People & Pets is now strikingly good.
So good that it can identify people and pets without their face at all.
Take that, Mission:Impossible.
If you’ve never messed with People & Pets, the setup is pretty simple. P&P scans your Photos Library for faces and presents them for you to name. The feature seems to understand that crowd shots and faces that show up only once are outliers. I generally get a couple dozen of my most pictured people to identify. Then you go through a “training” period where you’ll be offered more photos that P&P thinks are the people you’ve identified. You approve the correct ones. This helps the app understand what the person looks like as a youngster, or with a beard, or face half-covered with long hair. Before long the app is automatically adding new and old photos without prompts at all.
What shocked me, though, was that while creating my last post on Groups, I found that many of my cats’ photos were from the back or curled up with no face visible.
I checked out several people I’d identified and found the same thing there. People from the back, correctly tagged.
Crazy.
And here’s the thing. Lest you think that the new Apple Photos is just incremental window dressing, you should know that my same family photos library on a 2015 MacBook Pro running macOS Ventura shows my Pam gallery count at 43 images in Summary View and the All Pam photos view at 665. The same Library viewed on my 2020 M1 Mac mini pulls up 1644 Summary images and 3703 overall, as does my iPhone 15 Pro. Doubtless the newer technology is finding Pam in a lot of screenshots that were too small for Ventura Photos to find, but, hey, I’m impressed. How can you not love this?
What’s it all mean?
The obvious thing is that if People delivers a truly grand collection of the folks you want to find, then using People as the starting point seems much more effective than going to All Photos and swiping through your camera roll to find ‘that’ photo.
You can even Pin your young gymnast/new grandchild/best friend/cute puppy to your Apple Photos Home Screen so it’s the first thing you see. And saving photo attachments right into your Photos Library will include those in the People tagging as well, saving you from scrolling through old email or message threads to find attachments you think are there.
Now, the punchline is that Apple’s A.I. is not yet fully implemented and likely won’t be until early next year. Which means that there’s even more to come. Looking at the new collections like Trips, and the customization features on the Photos Home Screen, it’s exciting to think about a more organic search process that combines the improvements in recognition and the intelligence of A.I. to deliver quicker, more accurate search results without cramping your finger.
“Hey, Siri. Show me pictures of Pam in a kayak.”
Sweet.
I hope you are enjoying 5 Minute Photos. Watch for more details in coming weeks about the new Apple Photos features and use. If you would like a quick tutorial about using the People & Pets feature in iOS 18, you can get it HERE.
If you would like to work with me, here are two ways I can help:
COACHING & CONSULTING • Get expert, patient help to bash the overwhelm and build excitement using your photos. Become comfortable taking, organizing, and sharing your pictures with family and friends. Create a photo collection that captures your life and provides enjoyment every time you view it.
PHOTO MANAGEMENT • If you need a photobook, video/montage, or other project done for you, I can help. Overwhelmed by an out of control photo collection that you can’t face? I’m your guy. You’ll get decades of experience as a photographer and graphic artist, with over 12 years as an Apple Photos expert and certified photo manager. Let’s talk.