During the WWDC keynote a week ago, Apple announced that iOS 10 and macOS Sierra will bring facial recognition features alongside a brand new Memories tab and other improvements in Photos for iOS 10 and macOS Sierra.
According to a Medium post by Redditor “vista980622,” Photos’ facial recognition engine is capable of distinguishing between seven distinct facial expressions and detecting up to 4,432 searchable objects and scenes on your photos.
UPDATE: The original version of the linked Medium article stated that Photos can recognize 432 objects and scenes whereas the correct number is 4,432.
Photos recognizes the following seven facial expressions— Greedy, Disgust, Neutral, Scream, Smiling, Surprise and Suspicious—which are fully searchable and indexed for generating Memories.
The full list of the 4,432 objects and scenes Photos understands that you can search for is too long to paste here so check out the source link at the bottom if you’re interested to learn more. Some of these include flowers like daisy and a bunch of trees, including Christmas trees and oak tree.
As for the new Memories feature, which creates themed slideshows from your photos, Photos recognizes these 33 categories in Memories:
- Memories from areas of interest
- Best of past memories
- Memories that break out of routine
- Celebration in history
- Contextual memories
- Crowd
- Day in history
- Holiday in history
- Location of interest
- Nearby
- New contextual memories
- New memories
- Person’s Birthdays
- Person’s memories
- Recent events (calendar, crowd, holiday, people, person, social, trip and weekend)
- Region of interest
- Social group memories
- Sometime memories
- Special memories
- Favorited
- Trips
- Week in history
- Weekend
- Year summary
- Last week
- Last Weekend
“Default name of the moment will be automatically generated using metadata from the photos and tags from analysis of photos,” explains the article.
These new facial, object and scene recognition features in Photos are built on advanced computer vision and deep learning techniques that run locally on a user’s device, taking advantage of the power of Apple’s A-series of processors.
For illustration, Apple claims that iOS 10 performs an astounding eleven billion computations per photo to recognize faces, objects and scenes.
Likewise, the Memories feature uses advanced artificial intelligence to cluster together the photos that might make sense to you.
Memories can surface trips, photographs relevant to last week or last month, pictures of people that are special to you, topics like the beaches, mountains and so forth.
These new features in Photos will be available to users across the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac and Apple TV when their respective iOS 10, macOS Sierra and tvOS 10 software updates arrive this fall.