Everything you need to know about extended visual search on iPhone

Apple announced it in IT Worldwide Developers Conference June 9th, the next version of the iPhone operating system will be called iOS 26. The tech giant said iOS26 brings transparency Glass design In icons and menus, the Camera and Photo app gets a redesigned interface. iPhone. But when Apple was released iOS 18 September 2024 includes a feature called Enhanced Visual Search. I made a sound Privacy concerns regarding features.

read more: Everything you need to know about iOS 18

Enhanced Visual Search sends photo data from your iPhone to your Apple server to help you find photos in your Photo Library. It is on by default, but if you’re worried about privacy, you can turn it off in a few simple steps. Here are some things you need to know about enhanced visual search and how to disable the way it works when needed:

Improved visual search privacy measurement

“Using an expanded visual search on photos, you can search for photos using landmarks and points of interest.” Written online. “Your device personally matches the location of your photos and matches the global indexes that Apple maintains on its servers.”

According to Apple Research Submissionsome of the photos that may contain landmarks are encrypted and sent to an Apple server, so the big picture is not sent. Encrypted data is one point of any of you or other junk data that is not associated with any of you or someone else’s images.

Once the Apple server receives the data, it will not decrypt it. It works only with encrypted data. If the server establishes whether the corresponding landmarks are included in the encrypted photo data, the server sends an encrypted response to the device.

The company also wrote in the post that it uses third-party operations I can’t forget http A relay to hide the IP address of the data. Also, every time your iPhone sends photo data to the server, the data is given a new IP address.

However, some people question whether this is enough to protect your data. “If my computer sends data to the manufacturer of the computer, it’s not private, at least not entirely private,” the developer said. Jeff Johnson I wrote it online. “Software bugs are sufficient to make users vulnerable, and Apple cannot guarantee that the software does not contain any bugs.”

If you’re worried about improving visual search to send photo data to Apple’s servers, here’s how to turn it off: It is important to be aware if you have iCloud Account To save photos or back up iPhone data, the photos still go to Apple’s servers. Turning this feature off won’t stop you from doing that.

How to disable extended visual search

1. open setting.
2. Tap App.
3. Tap photograph.
4. Tap the next toggle Enhanced visual search.

Now your iPhone will send encrypted photo data to your Apple server to help you find photos on your iPhone. That also means that searching for photos on your iPhone can probably suffer. If you want to turn on the feature, follow the steps above.

For more information about iOS 18, here are some things you need to know iOS 18.5 and iOS 18.4. You can also check iOS 18 Cheat sheet And everything you need to know iOS 26.