To easily search photos. I understand the privacy risks but can see the positives as well. My grandmother is a wreath maker. She has thousand of photos of her wreaths and others for ideas. She can search "black orange wreath with spiders" and it will find all of the wreaths that are black and orange and feature spiders.
Hmm, I have been able to search for detailed objects by text in my photos for years. As I understand it, this thing is about recognizing places (buildings etc) and not persons, pets, objects.
Isn't this new though? First of all, we have not been able to disable it before (it wasn't a switch in the settings - that is definitely new), also I am sure now that this is turned off Photos will still be able to ID my cat or a red jacket or a blue butterfly just fine, as it always did. This is surely just for landmarks. I already have location data enabled so I already know I was at Kilimanjaro, I don't need this crap and I certainly don't need to feed their database with my image metadata.
Nothing in the texts I have found describes this other than only a new database for landmarks.
Edit: As u/qdtk writes, all previous object identification was done locally.
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u/Technoist 7d ago
Thanks! Turned it off. No idea why anyone would want/need to have this.