Facial recognition in iOS 17.0

iOS 17 added new features to the Photos app, including:

• Pets in the People album. Individual pets are now surfaced in the People album just like friends or family members.
• Siri Suggestions in the People album. Photos will intelligently suggest matches from Contacts in the People album to help you name individuals faster.
• Improved People album accuracy. The People album recognizes significantly more photos of your favorite people, even if they’re turned away from the camera.

It's possible that any one of these new features requires your devices to re-index People and recognize faces. Your devices do this when connected to power for extended periods of time without use (usually overnight), so the issue should go away after a few days.

If it doesn't go away, and you have more information to share, there may be other steps to take, but your phone probably just has to think about it for a little bit, for a lack of a better description.

Hi realspenz. I have almost 120K photos on my iPhone & iPad, and when iOS17 came out I was excited to be able to tag my dog in "People & Pets". I ran into the same problem you had - the "circle at the bottom left" wasn't showing up. I kept on reading things like, "it doesn't index unless your phone is plugged in and locked", so I'd do that for an hour and check again to no avail. I finally stopped looking and the corner circle showed up a few days later - so yes - it does take some time to index photos for facial recognition.

I wanted to add a name to my friend Ava's photos so I took a quick pic of her (I didn't want to look through 120K photos to find one) and I was waiting a few minutes for the corner circle to show up. When it didn't, I plugged my phone in for an hour - still no corner circle. I guess the lesson learned is that facial recognition takes awhile, and there is no way to force it to work on a certain photo. Patience is a virtue 🤷🏻‍♂️

Oh - the original reason I'm writing this: I wanted to know if facial recognition finally worked for you, and how long did it take?

Same issue here. No more facial recognition. And zero way to force it which is even more frustrating …

iphone 12 pro max too