Upscale Your People & Pets Collection With Groups

"YOU'VE GOT A FRIEND IN ME" • RANDY NEWMAN

Face recognition is kind of ‘been there, done that’ in the world of photo management software, but you still can’t say that they’re all alike. Professional Photos Managers all have their favorite apps for face recognition based on accuracy and speed. And when you’re dealing with a family collection that includes a child’s photos from age 2 minutes through not being a child anymore, facial recognition gets put to the test in a huge way.

Apple Photos is one of the best at following our lives from cradle to . . . wherever we are. Accuracy is stellar out of the box and with some user input, Photos uses machine learning to get even better. If you aren’t using the People Collection, start today. It will make finding your photos so much easier by relying on the face recognition to do the heavy lifting to find that person’s photos.

Face recognition got so good, in fact, that Apple added Pets to the People feature last year with macOS Sonoma. Now it’s called People & Pets; right there for you in Apple Photos on Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Dog and cat owners are thrilled.

So how do you follow that?

Complex search is a big thing this year in macOS Sequoia and iOS 18 with the promise of Apple Intelligence, the company’s own brand of A.I. meets Machine Learning. Apple has laid the foundation for integrating AI into the Apple experience with an upcoming release of this OS. For now, we get a few teasers as to how it will work.

And one of these is Groups, the new feature of People & Pets that lets you create custom groups from the faces you’ve set up in People & Pets already.

HOW ‘GROUPS’ SHOWS UP ON THE PHOTOS HOME SCREEN

Want to create a collection of your college besties together over the years? You’ve got it.

Have 3 kids in your family? How about all the shots you have with them together.

And how about Mom and Dad?

I used to search on one or the other and then favorite the shots where they both appeared. Now I can just create a group.

It’s simple, but so handy.

THE GROUPS SELECTOR VIEW

So here’s how to use Groups: