About People in Photos on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

The Photos app recognizes the faces of people in your photos and groups them together. You can give names to faces, mark your favorites, and explore all the photos that a person appears in.

Here's how it works

Sort your images by your favorite subjects — the people in your life. The Photos app uses advanced computer vision to scan all of your photos and recognize the people, scenes, and objects in them. Then you can see the best photos, videos, and Live Photos of each person in your collection. Depending on the number of photos you have, you can watch a Memory movie of them too. And when you have iCloud Photos turned on, the people you favorite or name stay up to date on all of your devices running iOS 11 or later and macOS High Sierra or later.

Find your friends in the People album

Photos organizes the images of your family and friends in your People album. You'll see a face thumbnail for each person your device recognizes.

  1. Open the Photos app.
  2. Tap the Albums tab.
  3. Tap the People album. 

Want to see even more People in your album? Just open a photo of someone that you want to add, then swipe up to see a thumbnail of that person under People. Tap on the thumbnail. Tap Add Name, then type the person's name (or tap the name if Photos suggests it). Tap Next. If the app has found that person's face in any other photos, it shows them to you. Confirm the photos that you want to associate with the name, then tap Done.

Name a face in the People album

Put a name to a face

Add a name to your photos to help keep your library organized. Photos intelligently suggests names from your Contacts or you can enter one yourself.

  1. In the People album, tap the face that you want to name.
  2. Tap Add Name at the top of the screen.
  3. Select the person's name, or finish entering it. If you're using iOS 11 or later, tap Next.
  4. Tap Done. 

Sometimes, the same person is identified in more than one group. To merge all of the photos under one group, tap Select, then tap all of the thumbnails that show the same person. Tap Merge at the bottom-right corner. Groups also merge if you give them the same name.

Favorite people

You have lots of friends and family members in your People album. Mark the People that you access the most as a Favorite so that it's easier to find them in the future.

Select people to favorite screenshot

If you haven't set any Favorites yet, you see favorite icon on all of your photos.


Favorite people screenshot

To favorite someone, just tap favorite icon.


Favorite any additional people that you want to easily access. You can also tap the person's thumbnail, scroll to the bottom of the screen, then tap Favorite This Person. Have multiple people that you want to favorite at once? Choose Select, tap each person you want to favorite, then tap Favorite at the bottom of the People album.

Change a thumbnail photo screenshot

Change a thumbnail photo

Photos automatically assigns a face thumbnail for each person it recognizes. If you want to use a different photo for someone's thumbnail, you can change it from their photo collection screen.

  1. Tap the person in the People album.
  2. Tap Select.
  3. Tap Show Faces to focus on just the person’s face in each photo.
  4. Tap the photo that you want to use.
  5. Tap share icon > Make Key Photo.

Fix mixed-up names and faces

If you notice that there's a photo of someone in a collection that's misidentified, you can remove it.

  1. Tap the person that you want to remove in the People album > Select.
  2. Tap Show Faces to focus on just the person’s face in each photo.
  3. Tap each photo that isn't of the person.
  4. Tap share icon > Not This Person.

Learn more

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