I sync photos directly from iMac to iPhone (iCloud sync “forgets” faces and is not an option). The synced photos are on my iPhone under “From my iMac”, but I can’t do any searches on them. Can anyone help?
iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 26
Pictures sent from a computer at a phone, the From My Mac pictures, are not "owned by Photos, and they're not fully under Photos' control. They can't even be deleted or edited, for instance, but must be managed through the Mac's Finder. The idea for this pre-iCloud system was that these pictures were just for temporary viewing on the phone.
iCloud Photos is the method we use to fully share our pictures among our Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc. I have no clue what you mean by, "iCloud sync “forgets” faces." It works fine for me. Not exactly the same, but for my son-in-law that I just looked at, I have 376 on my Mac and 378 on my iPad-- pretty close when I've been working with the pictures today. iCloud is a true synchronization, not just a transfer.
Thank you. This is very helpful in understanding what the relationship is between Photos on the two devices. (By “forgetting faces “ I mean that the facial identifications made in my iMac are lost in large numbers on both devices after syncing to iPhone. i have over 200 people identified by face, but take for example one person whom I may have identified by face 1000 times: after sync with iPhone, I may lose the facial recognition on 200 photos. The photos remain on both devices after syncing but the faces are reclassified as “unnamed “. This loss occurs on BOTH devices after syncing. The only recourse is to re-identify all 200 faces again on my iMac, which are, of course, lost again on the next sync. When this happens a couple times a month, to dozens/hundreds of photos on multiple people, it gets too much to handle. I have new devices operating the most updated software; multiple visits with Apple Support techs have been unsuccessful in fixing).
Excuse me- by “loss on syncing”, I mean by using iCloud Photos as the interface. Directly syncing avoids this problem.
Search iPhone for photos directly synced from iMac
