How to find all photos of a person on your Mac

A family library easily holds 20,000 to 60,000 files. The photos of one person sit scattered across folders like 2019_summer, iPhone_backup and a drive you last plugged in two years ago. To collect them by scrolling, you have to look at every single thumbnail yourself.

Filenames give you nothing to search. IMG_2841.HEIC says nothing about who is in the frame. Tagging by hand could fix that, and nobody tags 40,000 photos. The result is that most people can find recent shots and lose everything older than a year.

Face recognition in PhotoCore is opt-in. You turn it on with a single toggle in Settings. The app then detects faces with Apple Vision and computes a compact face embedding for each one, through Core ML, directly on your Mac.

To make someone searchable, you define a person once. Pick one or more sample faces, give them a name, done. From that moment every indexed photo of that person matches the search, including the ones you add next month. The photo detail view shows the people identified in each shot, and you can assign or remove a person there if a match looks wrong.

Type @ in the search bar and autocomplete lists your people. Pick a name and the results show every photo of that person. The mention works like any other word in the query, so you can pair it with a description, such as @anna birthday cake.

You can also mention two people together to see only the photos where they both appear. Results come back fast: PhotoCore searches 10,000 images in under 50ms on Apple Silicon.

Sometimes you know the shape of the photo you want before you know the query. PhotoCore gives you two people filters for that.

• Filter by one or more specific people, in any combination
• Filter by how many people are in the photo: 0, 1, 2, up to 6 or more
• Combine both with a text query to narrow thousands of shots to a handful

A practical example: filter for exactly 2 people, mention @anna, and type garden. You get the photos of Anna with one other person in the garden, out of a library where scrolling would have taken hours.

Cloud photo services scan faces on their servers. PhotoCore does the whole job locally: detection, embedding, matching and storage all happen on your Mac.

• No face data ever leaves the Mac
• Face recognition stays off until you enable it in Settings
• You can delete a person, or purge face data older than a date, at any time

For the full feature breakdown, read the face recognition feature page.