Searching for faces on your iPhone

I have another search tip for iPhone users today - a really powerful one. Did you know that the iPhone has built-in facial recognition? Once this is set up, you can search for all photos of a person or people in your iPhone. You can even combine names to find all photos of both people, together.

The iPhone indexes all of your photos in the background. It handles people similarly to how it handles the other automatic search that I discussed here. There is one big difference - with people, you can name them.

Here’s how to set up and use facial recognition on your iPhone.

Click on the Albums button at the bottom of your photos screen. You may need to scroll down past My Albums and Shared Albums before you see it.

After you click on People & Places, the screen will either tell you that it is scanning photos and to check back later, or it will tell you how many photos it has scanned and how many it has left to go. If there is a blue View People Album, click it. If not, you will need to let it do it’s thing, then come back to it later.

At the top of the People screen, you will see the people who are most represented in your photos. You will not see every face you have a photo of, just the faces that show up the most.

If you have never played with People before, you will be asked to add names to the faces.

Then Review additional photos to match a face with the name. As you confirm each one, they will be added in groups to that album. You don’t need to identify every photo that has that face, Apple uses artificial intelligence to add the close matches.

When you are done, each face will have its own album. You can watch a slideshow of that person, share, or decide to feature that person less if needed…

The real power of facial recognition is that once identified, you can search. And not just search for a single person, but you can combine search terms. For example, I can type in both of my sons’ names, and pull up all photos that have the two of them together.

You can also combine facial recognition with the the built-in search for things, and search for a combination. For me that is one son and “soccer” or the other and “fencing.” As discussed in my prior post, it’s not perfect, but it works in a pinch.

The system misses a fair bit, and does not work as well as the more powerful facial recognition software that I use with my clients, but this is a quick and easy way to add functionality to your library.

Have questions? Leave them in the comments below. Or chat with me.