Featured Photos not the same on my iPhone and my MacBook

Each device picks out the pictures to be "Featured" independently. My iPad, for instance, is different from my iPhone and from my Mac. If by "on iCloud" you mean Photos at iCloud.com, then iCloud.com doesn't do lots of things that are available on personal devices. Surprisingly, "Memories" seems to be the same everywhere.

You can make your own albums with pictures of your own choice which will be the same on all synchronized devices.

Yeah, each device picks its own Featured Photos based on its own algorithm. Sometimes the choices are hits, sometimes misses. (Looking at my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Pro all up to date, most choices are OK to pretty good, including one favorite of my wife, but there is at least one outright overexposed shot plus several shots of an ex-in-law we generally try to forget.

You can exclude some people from the "featured photos", see: Feature a person, a place or holidays less often in Photos on Mac – Apple Support (AU)

But generally, the featured photos are meant as a surprise.

• The Memories are explained in the user guide - the Photos.app is scanning our library for "significant persons, places or events". see: Watch memories in Photos on Mac – Apple Support (UK)

• The user Guide does no longer explain the "featured photos" collection. When it has been first introduced some years ago, it has been announced as a way to show us randomly some relevant photos as a surprise, that we have not looked at for a long time. The photographic quality does not seem to matter. I have never seen any photo among the "Featured photos" that I have marked as a favorite. Mostly they are photos that should have been deleted a long time ago. Are you seeing "favorite" photos among the featured photos?

léonie wrote: … I have never seen any photo among the "Featured photos" that I have marked as a favorite.

Well, that's interesting. My System Library is more or less all favorites, and that's what I see in Featured, of course. But I just looked at my Nikon Library in which about 6/7 are not favorites, and of my 10 Featured pictures, only one is not a favorite, though I had rated it 4 stars-- there was just a similar one that was better. How'd it know?