At this point the feature has only generated one memory for me, but I have a number of images from trips and events in my iCloud Photo Library and I'm not sure why it hasn't generated one for those as well. These are essentially groupings of photos that are related based on context and metadata.
The most interesting situation I found was the one above, where it correctly distinguished between a normal cake and a birthday cake and presented two separate search results where the birthday cake result had only the cake images where the happy birthday text writting in icing was visible.įor photo organization there's a new feature called Memories. The search generally works as expected, although there are limitations to what sort of objects the system has been trained to recognize. Much like Google Photos, you can now search for photos based on the content within them, and the app will now generate groupings of photos that are related. With Photos for macOS Sierra and iOS Apple is now employing machine learning as well. Around the same time, Google launched Google Photos, which employs machine learning to do image analysis which enables categorization and search on sets of photos based on the contents of the photos themselves. Apart from the most basic categorization like automatic albums for panoramas, selfies, burst photos, etc, the only automatic detection based on the content of a photo is the Faces album which tries, not always successfully, to generate an album containing photos where people's faces are visible. While Photos and iCloud Photo Library provide a simple way to make photos accessible across all Apple devices, they haven't done much to help with organizing those photos. Photos provided a great way to organize all the photos that users take on their iOS devices, and integration with iCloud and the new iCloud Photo Library was clearly something kept in mind during the development process, while Apple's previous attempt to integrate iCloud into iPhoto using Photo Stream felt like a tacked on feature. The Photos application for OS X was unveiled alongside OS X Yosemite, but while Yosemite launched in the second half of 2014 it wasn't until mid-2015 that the Photos app was officially released.