How to organise photos by person, privately

Organising photos by person is the most useful thing a photo app can do. "Every photo of Mum", "the kids with their cousins", "me and Sam on holiday": that's how people actually look for photos. But grouping faces means making face data about everyone in your library, including people who never agreed to be in an app. This article explains how to organise photos by person while keeping control of that data, using Photohawk Friends & Family as the example.

Three ways to organise by person

By hand. Albums named after people, filled one photo at a time. Private, but slow, and it never keeps up.

In the cloud. Some services upload your whole library and group faces on their servers. Convenient, but your photos and the face data about everyone in them sit with someone else.

On the phone, with a little help. The phone finds the faces itself, and your photos stay where they are. Friends & Family then matches only small face cut-outs in your own private cloud collection to group them accurately.

How it works in Friends & Family

1. Finding faces. Each photo is scanned for faces, on the phone. A first pass over a big library takes minutes; the finer details are added later, mostly while the phone charges.
2. Matching them. Small face cut-outs, never your photos, go to your own private face collection in our cloud, run by Amazon Web Services. Only your faces are in it, it's never matched against anyone else's, and the cut-outs are kept there encrypted, with a key for your account alone, until you delete them.
3. Grouping them. Faces that match are grouped into one person. You name the group, and corrections you make (merging two groups, taking a photo out) always win.

Why the cloud step? The phone alone struggles with big libraries, children who change fast and people who look alike. Matching in your own collection groups people far more accurately, while your photos stay on your phone.

Consent that means something

Face data is biometric data, which privacy laws treat as especially sensitive. In Friends & Family:

• Nothing is made before you agree. Friends & Family asks for your explicit consent first, for grouping faces and for matching cut-outs in the cloud, and the consent box starts unticked.
• "Delete all face data" deletes it, on your phone and in the cloud, at any time.
• The face data on your phone isn't in your phone backups.
• Friends & Family isn't offered to people who live in Illinois, because of that state's biometric privacy law.

Our article on face grouping and privacy explains each of these in more detail.

Names, relationships and corrections stay with you

Organising by person is more than grouping. In Friends & Family:

• Names you give people are stored on your phone.
• Relationships, like "Mum" or "my brother", are just for you. They're never sent anywhere, and you can search by them: "Mum in Cornwall".
• Corrections always win. If you merge two groups or say a photo isn't someone, that sticks.

Find, then share

Once your photos are organised by person, you can search them the way you remember them, by who and where, "Maya and Sam in Cornwall", and send people the photos they're in. Photos leave your phone only when you share them, and only the people you share with can see them. See sharing photos with the people in them.

A short checklist for any app

Whichever app you use to organise photos by person, ask:

• Are faces found on my phone, or are my photos uploaded?
• If anything is sent, what exactly, and do I agree to it separately?
• Is anything made before I agree?
• What happens to face data when I turn it off or delete the app?
• Are there ads, or is my data used for anything else?

Friends & Family has no ads. If you have children, our guide to finding every photo of your child on iPhone is a good next read.

Photohawk: Friends & Family is coming soon to the App Store and Google Play: see how it works.