Enhanced Visual Search in Photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately matches places in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides [your] IP address. This prevents Apple from learning about the information in your photos. You can turn off Enhanced Visual Search at any time on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > Apps > Photos. On Mac, open Photos and go to Settings > General.

Apple did explain the technology in a technical paper published on October 24, 2024, around the time that Enhanced Visual Search is believed to have debuted. A local machine-learning model analyzes photos to look for a “region of interest” that may depict a landmark. If the AI model finds a likely match, it calculates a vector embedding – an array of numbers – representing that portion of the image.

So it’s local. And encrypted. How is this really news? Am I missing something?