Can you tag/label photos in iPhone/iOS?

How can Apple not have such a fundamental feature in Photos. I am on the precipice of jumping off the Apple cliff and dumping all my Apple products. Every time I search the web on how to do something with an Apple product I invariably get the response: ‘You can’t do the with Apple’. Mind boggling. Apple: are you listening?

A much-needed feature, can't believe this hasn't been implemented yet and all they have in its place is an automatic person tagging feature that doesn't really work.

I have just sent the following feedback to Apple, I urge you to all send a request for this feature at https://www.apple.com/feedback/photos-ios.html:

(quote)

The Photos app has one glaring flaw: a lack of a proper tagging feature. Yes, it does have a feature where it attempts to automatically detect and tag specific people, but (1) it's only used for tagging people, not other things, (2) it still requires significant manual intervention to add new and organise existing people/photos.

What is needed, and will be a game changer, is the ability to manually tag any photo from any album in the Photos app, with any word the user chooses, from people to places to things to ideas. Suddenly, thousands of photos will be organised neatly with a few taps, and what was like searching for a needle in a haystack before can now be tracked down in a few seconds. This improves on the current People tagging feature by offering much more control and versatility.

I contacted Apple and the best work-around is to create an album for the keyword and add photos to that album.

Here is the link showing how to do this:

http://m.imore.com/how-organize-photos-and-videos-albums-your-iphone-or-ipad

For example, I just now created an album entitled "recipes" and added all my screen shots of recipes that I want to try. It was driving me crazy searching all of my photos to find the one recipe I was looking for while walking down the grocery isles.

I also suggest that everyone with this same frustration enter a suggestion to Apple. I already did and hope the next version will allow us to label and add keywords to our photos.

I am frustrated by this obvious omission as well. Apple should add this basic functionality. And while they are at, please add star ratings to Photos. It’s frustrating trying to organize photos in this app.

Did you ever find a solution. This is exactly what I am trying to do—assign a “subject” or “label” for photos to find through a search by that name, not a person. I currently can find “dog” through search and my iphone brings up all 600+ photos of dogs in my icloud, which is great, but I want to assign a specific holiday, or family or cooking and that is not currently possible on my iphone. I can make albums but too time consuming and too many in history to start THAT project. Hope Apple comes up with a labeling system to group photos soon!

What's particularly upsetting is that this apparently used to be possible, and Apple removed it. I first found an article from Apple explaining how to do it, and when it didn't work, I checked the date - 2013.

Sigh.

I'm having this issue too. We went to the zoo last weekend and when my son asks Siri to show him a picture of a giraffe, Siri opens the photos app, but the app does not show anything.

I need to be able to label the photos so at least the feature with Siri actually works.

I have found a way to add text to the forefront of the photo but really want to be able to tag in the background so you can add notes or keywords for searching.

For text in within the photo go to edit>... (dots on bottom right next to "done")markup>+ (circled symbol)>text

This will give you a text box in the photo to add. It is a royal pain to edit the text and change the font color so you can see it against the colors within the photo itself.

Amazingly I had this question too today ( 30-05-2017 ).

Google revealed this:

iPhoto for iOS (iPad): Flag, tag, or hide photos

The article was published: Oct 25, 2013

Off course it is all too easy to also mention to which version of iOS this applies. Helps people find something to only again search and not find it on your device...

So it seemed to be possible at one time... but not anymore.

Apple, chime in please? And don't take features away...

Erwin Panen

Absolutely agree. Tried to use your link, but it didn't work, so I found it here:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/photos-ios.html

I do hope they'll listen, because it's a glaring omission that could take the app a notch up toward great.

Actually this is not a solution, or it is a solution but not to this problem; the idea is to be able to add a searchable word (a tag) to each photo, not to organize all the photos into directories. The directory is such a '90 paradigm, Apple shouldn't even mention it, in 2017!

Rather than leaving them as photos, use Evernote

's scannable and Evernote, or alternatively Microsoft's OneNote. Either if these does OCR on the text in the picture (saved as a note) and can then be searched. Results sometimes depend on image quality. I save my recipes in (free) Evernote which is then also available on my computer. Searches done on my iphone find text in Evernote pictures in notes!

I used Google Photos as backup solution, once all photos synced, it allows you to edit DESCRIPTION in app, but no KEYWORD available. Sync works in real time.
If Apple could implement the EDIT on iPhone Photos, I would like stay with Photos, as the search functionality works much better on Mac photos.

I've been experimenting with FatCat software's PowerPhotos (NAYY). There's much it lets you do that Photos can't, and some of that has helped with photo organization on my phone, but they, too, have no iOS option so no ability to organize on the fly. Still searching...

hi rob,

yea you're right - its not facilitating this. The reason is on apple's site, its unfortunately not possible to save the tags as a part of the pics. It would be only possible on duplicating photo (and on this progress adding tags on it)...not really userfriendly...