iOS 18 introduced an “Enhanced Visual Search” toggle for the Photos app. | Screenshot: iOS 18 Settings app

Apple occasionally makes choices that tarnish its strong privacy-forward reputation, like when it was secretly collecting users’ Siri interactions. Yesterday, a blog post from developer Jeff Johnson highlighted what feels like such a choice: an “Enhanced Visual Search” toggle for the Apple Photos app that is seemingly on by default, giving your device permission to share data from your photos with Apple. Sure enough, when I checked my iPhone 15 Pro this morning, the toggle was switched to on. You can find it for yourself by going into the Photos settings on your phone (through the iOS Settings app) or a Mac (in the Photos app’s settings menu). Enhanced Visual Search lets you look up landmarks you’ve taken pictures of or search for those images using the names of those landmarks. To see what it enables in the Photos app, swipe up on a picture you’ve taken of a building and select “Look Up Landmark,” and a card will appear that ideally identifies it. Here are a couple of examples from my phone:

  Screenshots: Apple Photos
  That’s definitely Austin’s Cathedral of Saint Mary, but the image on the right is not a Trappist monastery, but the Dubuque, Iowa city hall building.

On its face, it’s a convenient expansion of Photos’ Visual Look Up feature that Apple introduced in iOS 15 that lets you[…]