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Apple's Photos apps for both iOS and macOS feature advanced object recognition technology, identifying items with great specificity and surprising accuracy, from common scenic queries like "beaches" to something as specific as "avocados."
To conduct a search on iOS, open the Photos app and choose the far-left "Photos" tab, then select the magnifying glass search icon in the upper right. As you begin typing your search item, a list of potential categories pops up.
These categories include things like locations, identified people, and albums. But they also include recognized objects, which work in advanced ways that could surprise you.
When searching with object recognition, your query could be as specific as a birthday cake or a piggy bank. It can even differentiate between a cat suit and an actual, living cat.
Of course, with something so all-enveloping, your results may vary. When viewing results for a query, there are bound to be mistakes, though you may be surprised with how uncannily accurate the search can be.
For example, in one random test, we searched for the term "scoreboard." In all, from 14 results returned, 13 of them were accurate shots taken within arenas. The only incorrect image shown was a screenshot from a videogame.
Some results proved less accurate, but still cast a wide enough net to be of use. For example, a search for "marriages" returned a number of photos from wedding ceremonies, but also showed photos taken from random nights out on the town, images of men in suits, shots of women in dresses, and images of people kissing — at events that were not actually weddings.
For many, it was easy to see how Apple's algorithm interpreted the images incorrectly. In a search for "zoo," we were presented with a number of images of animals behind cages. But one image featured a flock of birds behind a metal crowd control barrier — animals behind bars, but definitely not at the zoo.
In its current state, neither the iOS nor Mac Photos apps appear to allow users to inform the system that a specific image does not fit the search category.
Apple has not said how many items are identified via its object recognition algorithm. However, a Medium post from last year claimed to identify a total of 4,432 different scenes and objects in a total of 153 different categories.
It is not clear whether Apple has added to these lists in subsequent updates. For those interested in a truly comprehensive list of items and scenes that Apple's Photos app can search for, the complete 4,432 items identified as of last summer is included below:
Hah! You call that a list??!?!!? ;) I tried it with "elephants", and discovered I had 8 pictures of elephants in Photos... Some may have been from a niece's African vacation a few years ago, but some were probably used by my wife as "models" for her paintings (she knows I consider them a 'totem')... Strangely, though, it didn't locate the resulting elephants she'd painted from them...? I haven't the heart to tell her o:) :D
I wonder if the "avocado" search recognised the fruit or the text at the top of the photo
Here's one that seems to work great and will be very useful for me personally: whiteboard. It located 13 pictures of a whiteboard with notes I wanted to retain and a couple of pictures of PowerPoint presentations from a conference (close enough and same idea). I wonder if the people who spent years developing this feature are bummed that almost know one knows about it.
I was excited when this came out, and it's pretty useful sometimes, but the one thing I really wanted it to do, and I *know* I'm not alone, is search for memes. Apple can find a stack of avocados but it can't find giant letters sprawled on a pic? This is a huge peve of mine. And that would be something genuinely useful, especially for anyone under 30.
Holy Crap! It works!
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