How to Create and Customise Smart Groups of People

As someone who loves the face tagging features in Photos and was particularly excited when pets were added last year, I’ve been wanting one extra feature: the ability to group people together in automatic albums. Well, in iOS 18, as part of the Photos app redesign, there’s now the ability to create automatic groups of faces. Your phone will start doing this automatically by recognising people that commonly appear together, but you can also fine-tune and customise this process yourself.

So, in the Photos app, you’ll see that I’ve scrolled down to the People and Pets section, and when I tap here, at the top there’s a new section called Groups. You may have some groups here automatically, but for me, I’m going to press Create at the top. From here, I can then select any people or pets I’ve tagged in my photos to create that automatic group. To begin with, I’ll choose myself and my wife, so I’m going to tap onto me and then tap on Sapphy. When I press Create, I can give it a name if I want to. I’ll keep it as Jacob and Sapphy, and you’ll see straight away that Photos has pulled together all of the pictures of both of us appearing together. This will automatically update over time as more pictures are taken, and Photos will use its AI skills to try to find the best cover pictures to highlight in the album for you.

Of course, you can add more than one group of people together, and to demonstrate this, I’ll add one last group of myself and my two cats. So, I’ll go back to where I was just now, and I’ll press Create. On that list of people, I’m going to tap onto myself but also Polly and Pudding. Photos has recognised those cats over the last year, so when I press Create, I’ll get a group of pictures of the three of us. As you can see, there are now some pictures of me with both of my cats, including this rather bizarre one where they decided to squash me and keep me there for a good 20 minutes!

This is one of the features in iOS 18 that’s really, really helpful, and I love it. But it’s one that’s gone under the radar a little bit. It’s not one of the all-singing, all-dancing new features that you’ve probably heard about already, like icon tinting and dark mode icons. I’ve spent the summer exploring iOS 18, and I reckon I’ve found a hundred different things that make your phone better than it was before, and I’m really excited to share with you my 100 QuickTips for iOS 18.

Of course, just like normal, they’re all on my YouTube channel down below, so you can get all 100 quick videos there. Or, if you’d prefer a written format, I’ve made an eBook this year called 100 QuickTips for iOS 18. It’s friendly, easy to read, and there are screenshots and illustrations to help you make the most of your phone. So, I’d encourage you to check it out, and I’ll see you next time.