Q: How to label people in photos

15 Pro here too.

I don't trust the auto generated descriptions VO gives you. A lot of times it will say "may be" and then a person's name, even though I have that person tagged in the photo so it puts them all into a collection. This is neat when combined with photos with proper accessibility alt tags!

This may or may not work. I haven't verified what worked for me with a sighted person.

• Tap the photo with people you want to edit tagged in it.
• Use the actions rotor to find "show details" and activate.
• This will bring up a screen with details about the photo, such as the camera it was taken with, file size, Etc. Somewhere in this screen will be buttons with names of people that it thinks are in the photo, you can click on these to bring up a menu of options, one of which let's you change the name of the person, or add one if it says the person is unknown.

For me, it doesn't always give me an option to tag all the people in the photo, even though I know there are more people in it than are recognized. I don't think this is a VO thing. I haven't figured out a way to get it to show me more people that can be tagged.

When you're done, if you keep the photos app open and lock your phone on charge, the app will generate collections with the people and pets it recognizes. It's supposed to do the same with trips, but my phone doesn't have enough data to create one for those yet.

I don't really know anything about the Photos app recognizing someone's picture, unless they are in your contact list with a photo, maybe...
However, the only way I've found to get VO to announce a picture with a label or something you've written to describe it while navigating through the app or camera roll in other apps, other than using VO's labeling function, goes like the following, horrible process:
Before starting, be sure you are doing this to a photo that you haven't made a bunch of edits to, and if you have, then save it to Files app or Dropbox or somewhere else that you can then import it back as a fresh original photo with your edits built in to work on. Select Edit at the bottom of the photo. In iOS 26, select more at the top right area of the edit screen. Swipe through to the option for Markup. Select Add at the bottom of the next screen. Then select Image Description in the popup You might have to touch somewhere in the middle of the screen then swipe around to get the popup to focus for VO. This will give you an edit field to write stuff. You have to hit done on three screens to get back to the photo.
At this point, iOS has made the format and size of your photo different, like a smaller pixel count and HEIF is now JPG or something like that. So I go into Edit again, and revert it back to the original, and for what ever reason, the image description stays attached. If you don't care about the format and pixel count, then have fun jumping through the other fifty hoops. There's a few other weird things and I probably forgot something here or there, but they probably don't matter for what you're doing.

I think there is a way to do this with Seeing AI, but it's rather complicated at least for me and I haven't attempted it. But a sighted former coach told me she got Seeing AI to properly tag a few photos that she took. Sorry this isn't more helpful, but hopefully someone else can chime in on this thread. I am honestly rather daunted by the whole photo/camera thing, and am on my second iPhone. Where's my brother? He is a more experienced iOS user than yours truly.

OP is talking about the feature in the photos app where you can tag people and pets in them for organization. This is not specific to VO.

From what I've read, when you edit a photo, if iOS recognizes a face in it, a little question mark icon will show up underneath it. You can tap on that to name that person. Last I tried this, VO read this icon as "unidentified person", which I tapped and then typed in the correct name. I might've mistagged people though since I haven't verified with a sighted person.

Once you've tagged people in your photos and let your phone index them, you get collections of people and pets that let you see the pics based on who you have tagged. I have collections that have all the pics of myself, my sister, and each of my former guide dogs. It's a little bit like how tags let you filter blog posts based on a particular topic.

What OldBear is talking about is something entirely different -- the descriptions you can now add to photos via mark up. These are essentialy accessibility alt tags, descriptions that are specifically for screen readers. Yes, adding them to photos is kind of a long process, especially if you do what I do and use Be My AI to help. Of course AI gets it wrong sometimes, and it's hard to know when that happens because we can't verify how accurate the descriptions it generates are, which kind of makes it less useful. I was adding a description to a selfie a friend took at a party a couple weeks ago. There was a face painter there and I got him to do a drawing of Mario from Nintendo on my arm. The AI said it was a dog with a red bandana, which made my friend laugh.

Anyway, if you combine these two things in the photos app and use Be My AI or Seeing AI to help, it can be really neat! You get a good, detailed description of the photo as soon as you touch or flick to it and don't have to wait for the autogenerated description that VO gives you at the end. It's no where near as meaningful as an audio recording, but it's still cool!

You mean if I name a person, the phone be able to put the photos in the same folder if I want? Or identify the person? Just asking. Long live cats.

I haven't come across the tagging a person thing because I don't have people pictures. It's good to know though.
I use two different AI models to get a good idea of what is in a picture and hope for the best, but a copy/paste from Seeing AI can give you a base description. One advantage of putting in the alt text or image description is VO reads it when an app displays your camera roll, or what ever they're calling it now, when you go to upload a photo to the app,, like social media or something. Without it, it's very difficult to figure out which is which. You don't even have the IMG filename iOS gives it, just the date and the vague VO attempt to describe the image. I usually have a few versions of a photo from editing it, and that adds more confusion.

This tagging is a way to identify different things in photos. The photos app generates categories to sort these into. You might see some of these if you open the photos app and tap on the collections tab. If you then rotor to headings, you'll see different ones like memories, recents or places. When you've tagged enough people or pets in photos and the app indexes them, you'll see a heading called "People and Pets". You'll see each identified person or pet if you flick right -- these are just normal buttons. Tapping on one will show you all the pics that have that person in them.

So you could, probably best with some sighted help, tag all your pictures of Bella the cat, and then once your phone indexes everything, you'd have the new collection, with a "Bella" button under it that you could tap and voilla, all your pics of Bellla the cat in one place for you to flip through and/or share. I think these also sync between your devices as well.

Tagging all your pictures and adding descriptions to them for VO is a lot of work if you have a lot of pictures on your phone, and it may not be worth it to you. I don't have that many right now, and I still have some of mine to do.

Do have many pictures of ladies friends but will do for Bella. I will make sure tag her so I can find her. Since she is in heaven. Long live cats.