How do I fix iPhone's inability to recognize and name a deceased dog in older photos?

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Level 1

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How do I fix iPhone's inability to recognize and name a deceased dog in older photos?

We had to put our beloved dog Robbie down this afternoon and were completely and 100% broken.

I went looking at photos of him in his collections group and it only recognized him until 2020. We got his in 2014.

I went back to photos before 2020 and it recognizes there’s a dog in the pictures but it won’t let me name him in order to add that specific picture to his collections.

In pictures that have both of our dogs, it identifies our other dog. But it won’t let me name Robbie and doesn’t even identify he exists.

My husband says I’m getting frustrated with technology and it’s the last thing I need to be doing, but I’ve got to get this fixed.

even when he’s the only one in the picture, it won’t identify him as a thing. This is killing me. Someone tells me there’s a fix for this.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: iPhone won’t identify our dog before 2020. It identifies our other dog, but in pictures of just Robbie - it identifies hes a dog but won’t let me name him. We had to put him down today and this is killing me that I can’t see his pup pics in his album

iPhone 14 Pro Max, iOS 26

Posted on Jan 31, 2026 1:15 PM

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Answer 1

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Richard.Taylor

Level 6

17,655 points

Feb 1, 2026 8:14 AM in response to Emma_in10

I'm so sorry about Robbie-- that is very tough…

Recognizing faces, especially our pets, is very hard stuff! And what seems obviously a dog's face to us may not be so obvious to a computer. When an image is first loaded into Photos it scans the picture to see if there's anything in there that it thinks might be a face. If it finds what it thinks is a face, it records the characteristics in its database and looks for other matches. The thing is-- it never scans that picture again, until there's a major OS change. With no change in the algorithms, another scan would just get the same result.

Here's my favorite face ID:

It from the grass in my front lawn.

What I'm saying is, you can't expect too much. Many of us don't rely on the computer's face recognition alone-- we put the name of the dog or person in the Caption field of the picture. Then, when I search for my cat, Flurry, I get the pictures in her pet album, but I also get all the pictures where she's not recognized by the computer.

(Well, this is from Photos on my Mac, but the same works on an iPhone.)

A big advantage to using the Caption is that when you send the picture to others, you can choose to include the caption, but you can't include face recognition, because there is no standard.

I have also made a point of collecting pictures together in a time of sorrow-- I've found it to be a great comfort.

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