How can I turn OFF AI (wild-*** guesses)in Mac Photo searches

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Level 1

4 points

How can I turn OFF AI (wild-*** guesses)in Mac Photo searches

I am a professional botanist. I have many thousands of plant photos to which I have assigned the scientific name as the photo title plus the scientific name of the plant family as a keyword. If I want to see what photos I have taken of a particular plant, I have searched by scientific name, and Find immediately found all the photos. A while back Apple introduced an AI photo ID function that supposedly would provide the scientific name of a plant photo. I've tried it some, and occasionally it comes up with the right name for a plant, but much more often it's way off—it's definitely not ready for prime time. Well, Apple apparently just linked this inept AI function with their Photos Search. Today I searched for a particulat plant's scientific name and in addition to the 26 images I was looking for 126 other photos showed up of plants that in some regard resembled the plant I searched for. That's not useful! I don't want AI input on my searches. I cannot find any way of turning it OFF.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 14.5

Posted on Jun 14, 2024 5:47 PM

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Answer 1

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,582 points

Jun 14, 2024 11:41 PM in response to D_J_Carino

Regrettably, there is no way to turn it off. So my first port of call would be here:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

and report the flaws in their system

That said, Photos is a give-away application, not designed for a professional setting in any circumstance. It is designed to be simple to use, which is another way of saying, with fewer choices for the user. It might be worth considering migrating to another app, one with more robust choices and more fine control for the User.

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Answer 2

Jun 15, 2024 7:32 AM in response to D_J_Carino

I, too, hope this plant name and other category stuff can be fixed to be more useful. In the meantime, you might consider using keywords, lilke "Asclepias_asperula" or even "ICZN_Asclepias_asperula" to help with searches. Keywords are very robust and export with a picture in its IPTC metadata. Or you could include this in the caption or title fields, which are also kept in the IPTC metadata. There, a search for ICZN_Asclepias would yield all in the same genus. Since the keywords, titles, and captions are in the IPTC, they would be searchable in other image managers, as well.

The hassle will be assigning these in thousands of pictures. The advantage of keywords is that you can select all the ICZN_Asclepias_asperula pictures (I've been seeing a lot of this around Dallas, lately) and add a keyword. With captions and titles Photos only allows you to replace, so you can't just add it on the end. The disadvantage to keywords is that ICZN_Asclepias_asperula woud need to be a different keyword than ICZN_Asclepias for a genus search.

The best way to search for this stuff in Mac Photos is with Smart Albums where you can have multiple criteria.

Just trying to think it though....

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