Name This Pet Is the Best Feature of iOS 17
Anyone with a pet has hundreds of photos of them doing the same thing. Now you can see them all in one place.
There's plenty of new features in iOS 17 in September, but one has barely received a mention in Apple's promotional material. In fact, it's not even listed.
The feature? Pets are finally join People in the Photos app. And given how much people love their pets, this is gonna be crazy popular.
The feature itself is understated. Open a photo with your pet, enter its name, and instantly every photo of Bunny, Pot Roast or Hamlet is catalogued into their own fluffy album.
This is the same feature as People which detects faces, but somehow seems to work faster, and more accurately than ever before.
Note: if you previously used the People feature to tag animals in iOS 16, you might want to remove that entry, and use the dedicated Pets feature.
I don't have a pet myself, but I interact with a fair few regular animals around the waterways, a neighbourhood cat that likes to camp outside my Grandma's house in London, and this menace that I cat-sat a couple of winters ago.
Tagging Chiquito in one photo resulted in hundreds of photos, some where you can't even see his face. Like the photo in the header of this article where all you can see is Chiquito's silhouette on a snowy pontoon.
Dogs and Cats seem to work, but not chickens, alpacas or parrots. I can't find a list of supported animals, so I'd be interested in which animals this is restricted to.
As an aside, People and Pet detection in iOS 17 is so confident in its own ability now, that it's basically already created albums for each person or pet silently. Before you name the pet. It means that applying the name doesn't then go on a hunt for all other photos – they're already grouped.
If you're already using the iOS 17 beta, you can use this feature now. For everyone else, expect a release in mid to late September 2023.