March 2021 • Macworld 107INCONSISTENT 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 inSolutions to all your Mac problems. Glenn Fleishman reports
Help Desk
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 KeychainMarch 2021 • Macworld 107INCONSISTENT 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
Solutions to all your Mac problems. Glenn Fleishman reports
Help Desk
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