The Photos app has added an impressive new search capability. The app can recognize objects in your photos, allowing you to search for thousands of objects within your photo library. We'll see this feature and some new automatic sorting features including face recognition and location sorting.
- [Narrator] The Photos app in iOS 10 has some of the most powerful and impressive new features. Generally, these new enhancements are built around helping you find exactly the photos you want as quickly as possible. So, let's launch the Photos app and take a look. Now, I want you to see that I already have a pretty big library here of photos in the Photos application. And the first thing you need to understand is that Apple has added some impressive image recognition technology under the hood which gives the Photos app the ability to literally recognize people and objects in your photos.
When you import photos, or take them with the built-in camera, the computer will scan them and will identify objects in your pictures from a list of thousands of possible keywords. Now, what does this do for you? Well, it allows you to search using an impressive amount of keywords. So, for example, I'm here in the main Photos library. If you look down on the bottom row, Photos is selected on the far left. So, I can hit this magnifying glass up in the top of the screen to perform a search, and I'm just gonna search for the word, flower.
And you can see, it found four pictures, and if I tap on that, here are four pictures of flowers. And, of course, I can tap on one to see it larger. Hit the back button in the top left to go back. Now, here's the impressive part. I never tagged these pictures with any keywords. The computer was able to recognize that there were flowers in these pictures, and it's able to recognize lots of things. So, for example, I'm gonna hit the back button up in the top left, I'll tap on the search field again, and hit the x to clear it, and, this time, I'm gonna search for the word, statue.
It finds 17 pictures with the word, statue. And, of course, I can tap on any of these pictures to look at it full screen. I'll take a step back again, and again, and let's try something else. This time I'll search for the word, animals, and it found 14 pictures of animals, and it will get even more granular. I can go back again and I could search specifically for dog, and it finds seven pictures of dogs. Now the list of search options is not unlimited.
So, for example, if I go back again, and I search for the word, unicycle, it does not find anything even though I know for sure there are some pictures with unicycles in this library. That's because unicycle is not on the list of things that the app is programmed to recognize. But, if you tag photos with keywords, manually, in the Photos app, in macOS, and then sync your Photo library to your iPhone or iPad, those keywords will work for searches here.
But with the impressive amount of things that the application recognizes by default, this might not be necessary. Just be aware that it does take some time for the app to scan your library. So, after upgrading or after importing a large amount of photos, you'll need to quit the app, plug your device into power, and lock the screen, and give it some time to run the detection in the background. Okay, so I'm gonna cancel this. We know the application can recognize objects, but I want to see that it can also recognize people.
To see this, I'm gonna go down to the bottom of the screen, this little row with three buttons, I'm gonna tap on Albums, and you'll see, by default, there is this album labeled People, and if I tap on that, you can see that it automatically detected people's faces in my library. And so, I can tap on any of these collections and this just happens to be a collection of photos with me. Now, I want to give this group a name. So, I'm gonna tap on the field up at the top where it says Add Name, and I want to label this as Nick.
I'll hit Done and now this has a name. And if I take a step back, you'll see that is labeled with my name. Now, of course, there are some tools here for refining the selections that the application makes. For example, I can tell here that there are two separate groups that are clearly both groups that contain Megan. So, I might want to merge these two groups together. So, what I'll do is I'll hit the Select button, up in the top right, I'll select both of those groups, then I'll hit the Merge button down at the bottom, and confirm, and now those two groups have been merged.
And I could go in there and I can give it a name if I want to. But I really want you to see is that you can leverage this face recognition feature in the search tool that we saw a moment ago. So, I'm gonna hit the back button up here in the top left. I'm gonna go back to my main Photos library, back to that search tool. And, of course, I can just search for Nick because I gave that group a name. And now, of course, it's gonna find all of the pictures with me. Now, that's pretty obvious, but take a look at this. I can actually combine keywords from different features that we've seen.
So, if I search for Nick, but then I also put in a second word. I'm gonna search for statue. Now it's gonna find all of the pictures that contain my face, which it detected from the People feature, and also contain a statue, which it detected from that automatic recognition feature we saw a moment ago. So, I can combine search with these different features. Okay, so let me cancel this and go back to my library. Another new automatic sorting feature is Places.
Many cameras, including almost all of the smartphones that have cameras built-in, including the iPhone itself, can record GPS location data along with the photos you take. So, lots of your photos may have location information already attached to them. And the Photos app can display those pictures on a map. To see that, I'm gonna tap on the Albums button on the bottom of the screen, again. And this time, I'm gonna select Places, and, of course, we see a map of the world, and I see all of these little groups for all of the pictures that I have from different parts of the world.
And, using the pinch gesture on the screen, I can actually zoom in. So, here are 42 pictures from Switzerland. I can tap on that and I can see all of those pictures, here, or I can take a step back and zoom in even closer because I know I visited several cities in Switzerland. And now, if I tap on this group here, I'm only seeing pictures from Geneva. And when I'm done, I can take a step back. I could zoom out again, and I can scroll around to other parts of the map again. But again, I can use this to combine search terms.
So, if I take a step back, go back to my Photos library, tap to do a search. I could search for Scotland, and, of course, it finds 22 pictures from Scotland. Or, I can go back and I can search for Scotland and also put in Nick, and it finds three pictures of me in Scotland. Or, I could do Scotland, statue, and it finds two pictures I took of statues in Scotland. Okay, so let's cancel this and go back to the library.
Finally, I want to take a look at the new Memories feature, and that can be found on its own button down here at the bottom of the screen. If I tap on that, you can see that it automatically sorted some of my pictures together in Memories. So, this can use all of the information that we just saw, object detection, location, people, and, of course, dates to automatically create groups of photos that match a theme. And this is what you see when you go into Memories. It will automatically create a few that you can take a look at.
And if I tap on any of these Memories, I can scroll through and I can take a look at all of those photos. If I scroll all the way down to the bottom, there will be even more Memories that relate to the memory that I'm looking at now, and I could tap on one of those. As I'm looking at these, I could hit this Show All button and it just sort of tiles them out so I can see them in the normal sort of layout. And, if I go all the way up to the top, on this sort of masthead image on the top, there's a play button. If I tap on that, it will play an animated slide show of these pictures.
So, I can just give it a moment, and I see it will cycle through all of the pictures in this memory. And, of course, when I'm done, I can just tap on it, hit the back button up on the top left to get out of that. So, that's just a quick look at the new features in the Photos app in iOS 10.
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Video: Photos