Learn how to use keyword search in Apple’s Photos app to find videos and live photos with specific sounds like laughter, crying, and applause on an iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Go ahead, try this out now by typing keywords describing sounds like “speech,” “laughter,” “blabber,” or “applause,” into the search field of the built-in Photos app. Apple’s sound recognition algorithm will identify footage and live photos from your library containing described sounds. If you tap a video in search results, it will play from the spot where the specified sound can be heard. As a bonus, the video scrubber highlights in blue other places in the clip where the same sound appears.
You can test this by describing the sounds you know you’ve captured in your iPhone videos over the years. If no videos match the query, you won’t get any results.
Finding “speech” in videos
I first entered “speech” because I took numerous videos at various technology conferences over the years. Just like that, the Photos app has surfaced all those clips along with a video of young musicians singing at the beaches and interacting with the audience. I also got a 2010 video taken at a hockey match, which surprised me before I realized that the algorithm picked the announcer’s voice. It also saw a video of my late cat where I talk to him, and a few other relevant results.
Finding “applause” in videos
I typed “applause” next, and was greeted with additional videos of the beach singers and the hockey match I just mentioned in the previous section. I realized why—we did applaud the musicians for their magical performance. As for the hockey match, there was a musical performance during the halftime break, followed by roaring applause. The only mistake the algorithm made was a clip where I relax my legs at the beaches. There’s no applauding in that one, but the algorithm probably incorrectly classed the sound of splashing waves as applause.
Finding “laughter” in videos
For my final test, I picked the word “laughter” because I’m a happy dude who tends to laugh a lot. Indeed, all of the video matches that I received for this particular search term happen to include laughter at some point or another.
Apple’s evolving sound recognition
This cool feature is underutilized, which is a shame because it works much better than you probably imagine. Apple first brought sound recognition to the iPhone as an accessibility feature with iOS 14. This feature lets your iPhone automatically recognize sounds which indicate danger or the need to act, like a ringing doorbell, a crying baby, a barking dog, a siren or fire alarm, prompting the system to notify you. If you’re interested to learn more about how this works, our step-by-step tutorial teaches you how to use sound recognition on your iPhone and iPad.
Also, check out: 41 tips to make the most of the Photos app on your iPhone