Ok, how did I not know this trick? I have a 15-year-old daughter and I’m around techy people all day and I never realized searching for photos in an iPhone by category was ever an option. I’ve seen the little search button in my photos, but I guess I always just ignored it. Well, not anymore! No more scrolling up in the photos that I took months ago. Apple has made it so much easier by designing the photos app to recognize objects and people. You can search photos using keywords like “flower”, “football”, or “food”, just as if you were doing a Google search for images and all of your photos saved on your phone that match will appear. GENIUS. You can also search for events and locations.

iPhone-7d
loading...

If you’re clueless like me, here’s how it works.

  • Open the Photos app on your iPhone.
  • Tap the Search tab located on the bottom right-hand corner.
  • Type in whatever you want to search. The name of a place (Memphis), an item (flowers), a person (your child’s name), and all of your matches will appear.

You might be thinking, “does this mean Apple is looking at all of my photos?” Here’s how it works. All of the photo processing happens on your phone instead of being sent up to the cloud. With that said, there’s really no need to worry about anyone at Apple actually looking at your pics. According to Apple, all of the face recognition and object detections are done completely on your device.

Of course, I had to see if there were any other cool little tricks I’ve been missing out on and I came across these.

Typing cursor – When typing, hold down the space bar to turn your keyboard into a trackpad, letting you move around words and sentences more easily.

Close all Safari tabs – To do quickly and at the same time, just hold the overlapped squares in the bottom right-hand corner, and press 'close all tabs'.

Delete lots of photos quickly – Hold your finger down on a photo and then drag it diagonally in Photos to select lots of images at once, then hit delete.

Check if you're due a battery upgrade – Batteries inside smartphones degrade over time. Just go to 'Settings', 'Battery', then 'Battery Health', and look at the Maximum Capacity reading. Generally, a battery is considered worn when you're down to 80% capacity. If you're below 80%, you can buy a new battery from Apple.

Apparently, I need to spend more time learning my phone. If you know about some cool little tricks you want to share, let us know.

More From 99.9 KTDY