Help Desk

INCONSISTENT FACIAL RECOGNITION IN APPLE PHOTOS

It is extremely handy to tag people you know in photos you take. You can then easily find images of those people across time and at specific events. This feature appears in Photos in iOS, iPadOS and macOS, but may not work correctly across devices without iCloud Photos enabled – and sometimes even with it turned on.

Many companies have tried to make this easier by adding facial recognition, so that software algorithms try to guess who is the same person across many faces in your photos, which may include your dearest loved ones and strangers.

Apple’s most recent approach, implemented several years ago in Photos, kept all facial ID local to your computer or mobile device. (As opposed to, ahem, Google.) In 2016, it promised a secure way to sync this information via iCloud, which finally went into effect in Photos 3 in late 2017 for macOS and the Photos app in iOS 11.

The trick Apple employs is creating a sort of shorthand mathematical signature of each photograph associated with the same person. It is a system similar to iCloud Keychain that allows Apple devices logged into the same iCloud account to exchange those signatures via iCloud sync without Apple having the ability to decrypt and view it. Apple doesn’t send names or images, just these shorthand notations.

With iCloud Photos enabled, this should allow the same photos to have the same people identified in each of them. In practice, I’ve found facial-recognition generally poor. Whenever I revisit a person’s