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. These features have been present since iOS 10 in 2016 and have been continuously improved, with AI-powered object removal (Clean Up) added with iOS 18.1 in October 2024.

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.