Q: How to label people in photos

By peter, 4 October, 2025

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

I am running iOS 26 on an iPhone 15 Pro.

I have a photo of two friends, a man and a woman.

When navigating through the photos app, Voiceover tells me that it is an image of two people. Unfortunately, it also tells me that the image is probably of my wife and I.

I tried labeling the image with the names of the two friends, but Voiceover still tells me that the photo is of my wife and I.

I thought there was a way of telling iOS who was who in a photo so that it could search for people, etc., but can't figure out how to do it. Nor can my sighted wife. She says the method for doing this in iOS 26 must have changed.

Any hints on what to do?

Thanks.

--Pete

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Comments

By Brian Giles on Saturday, October 4, 2025 - 21:50

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.

By OldBear on Saturday, October 4, 2025 - 23:23

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.