The Photos app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac uses AI to automatically scan a user's photo library, recognize faces, identify scenes and objects, and organize pictures into searchable albums — all without sending images to Apple's servers. Users can search for "dog at the beach" or "birthday cake" and find matching photos from years ago. These features have been present since iOS 10 (2016) and have been continuously improved.

Apple uses machine learning models running on the Apple Neural Engine — a dedicated processor chip inside Apple devices built specifically for fast AI computations — to analyze photos on-device. Face recognition groups pictures of the same person together into a "People & Pets" album (pets were added in iOS 17 in 2023). Scene analysis powers natural-language photo search and the automatic creation of Memories videos from related images. Apple's own machine learning research has been published on the technical details, describing a pipeline that generates embeddings (mathematical summaries of faces and objects) to match people across thousands of photos. An additional AI-powered feature called Clean Up, part of Apple Intelligence, was added with iOS 18.1 to let users remove distracting objects from photos.