iOS/macOS
How to use Photo’s new abilities to recognise individual pets as well as people
IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes
YOU WILL LEARN To teach Photos the names of your cats and dogs so you can find them with ease
YOU’LL NEED iOS 17 or later/ macOS 14 or later
Dogs and cats are such popular pets that our Photos library may be packed full of pictures of our canine and feline friends. In older versions of Photos, you could try to find photos of your pets by typing ‘dog’ or ‘cat’ into the Search field. You’d then have to scroll through hundreds of thumbnails of different animals to find the best shots of a specific pet. The Photos app has been able to identify people ever since its inception, but changes in macOS Sonoma, iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 mean that Photos can now identify individual pets too – as long as they are a cat or a dog! You’re out of luck if you want to quickly find shots of specific hamsters!
In this walkthrough, we’ll show you how to name a particular dog or cat in a photo or video so that Photos can gather other pics and clips of that pet in an easy-to-find collection. You’ll also learn how to use Photo’s Visual Look Up too to find out more about your breed of pet – though sometimes it does misidentify one type of breed for another! George Cairns
EXPLAINED… Name your pet and look up breed details
If Photos recognises a pet, the ‘i’ icon changes to an animal icon. Click it to name your pet and look up its details.
Recognisable pets will have a thumbnail of their face in the Info palette. Click on that thumbnail to name the pet.
Unidentified pets will have an ‘Unnamed’ label below their face. Type their name in to the text field.
Click the Visual Look Up icon to discover more about your pet’s breed on Wikipedia.
HOW TO Use new pet recognition tools in Photos
We’ll start by identifying pets in iOS Photos since you use your iPhone to snap the shots. Tap Albums, then tap on the People & Pets album. (If there are no pets in your Library this will just be labelled the People album.)
You’ll see a collection of circular thumbnails depicting people. Scroll down to locate the pet thumbnails. Tap on a particular pet’s thumbnail, and tap Add Name. In our example here, we’ve typed ‘Ebony’. Tap Next, then Done.
When you tap the Ebo
