About Enhanced Visual Search in Photos
Enhanced Visual Search allows you to search your photo library for landmarks within your photos or videos.
Use Enhanced Visual Search
Starting in iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, Enhanced Visual Search lets you search your photo library for landmarks or points of interest in photos or videos – making it easier to find what you’re looking for, even if those photos and videos don’t have any saved geolocation information.
Just search in the Photos app or via Spotlight for a landmark, such as the Golden Gate Bridge or the Arc de Triomphe, and the search results will show the full set of photos and videos in which that landmark is visible.
How Enhanced Visual Search protects your privacy
Enhanced Visual Search was built from the ground up to protect your privacy, combining on-device processing with other privacy-preserving techniques. As a result, Enhanced Visual Search works without sending your photos or videos to Apple and without Apple learning about the information in those photos or videos.
First, an on-device machine learning model determines whether a photo or video in your library is likely to contain a landmark or point of interest. Then it creates a low-fidelity mathematical representation of the part of that photo that may contain the landmark, called an embedding. This embedding – not image data – is encrypted and sent to Apple servers, where it’s compared against a global list of landmarks and places that’s too big to fit on your device.
The decryption keys remain on your device, so that Apple servers can’t decrypt the encrypted embedding or search result.
The encrypted embedding is only used to return the search results, and isn’t used to supplement Apple’s global list or for any other purpose. The request from your device (including the encrypted embedding) isn’t stored by Apple after the search results have been returned to your device.
The request from your device (including the encrypted embedding) isn’t linked to your Apple Account and can’t be associated with your account or device.
To maintain your privacy while matching the places in your photos to the landmarks in the global list, Enhanced Visual Search uses these privacy-preserving techniques:
Homomorphic encryption – a technique that allows a search to be performed with the encrypted embedding without decrypting it. The Apple servers receive the encrypted embedding, match it to the landmarks in the global list, then send back encrypted search results. Your device uses decryption keys stored only on your device to decrypt and show those results. Apple servers can’t decrypt the embedding or search results, because they don’t have access to the decryption keys.
Differential privacy – a technique that masks the request from your device (including the encrypted embedding) by adding noise, or fake information, so that it becomes extremely difficult to figure out anything about a request or encrypted embedding sent from any one device. With Enhanced Visual Search, your device sends fake requests alongside the request from your device, so that the server can’t identify which is the genuine request.
OHTTP relay – a third-party anonymisation network that hides your IP address before the request from your device (including the encrypted embedding) reaches Apple servers, which helps prevent any request from being linked to you, your device or any previous request sent by your device.
Find out more about these privacy-preserving techniques
Find out more about Photos & Privacy
Turn Enhanced Visual Search on or off
You can control this setting at any time.
On iPhone or iPad
Open the Settings app > Apps > Photos.
Scroll down and turn Enhanced Visual Search on or off.
On Mac
Open the Photos app.
From the menu bar, choose Photos > Settings > General.
Select or unselect Enhanced Visual Search.