How to turn off Enhanced Visual Search on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

The Morse teamPublished November 7, 20267 min read

To turn off Enhanced Visual Search on an iPhone or iPad, open Settings, tap Apps, tap Photos, scroll down, and turn off Enhanced Visual Search. On a Mac, open the Photos app, choose Photos > Settings > General, and uncheck Enhanced Visual Search (Apple). As of November 7, 2026, the setting still has that name in macOS 27 Golden Gate, and turning it off stops your devices from asking Apple's servers which landmarks appear in your photos.

We read Apple's support article on the feature (its current version is dated September 15, 2025), its Photos & Privacy legal notice (dated December 12, 2025), its Machine Learning Research post of October 24, 2024, the iOS 27 iPhone User Guide, and the macOS 27 Photos User Guide, all on November 7, 2026. We also read developer Jeff Johnson's December 2024 post that started the argument over the feature, and his follow-up. Apple's engineering here is careful, and it published how it works. The case for switching it off rests on how the feature was turned on, since no flaw in it has been published.

How do you turn off Enhanced Visual Search on an iPhone or iPad?

The steps are the same on both, per Apple's support article (Apple):

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap Apps, then tap Photos.
3. Scroll down and turn off Enhanced Visual Search.

Apple's own research post still gives an older path, "Settings → Photos → Enhanced Visual Search" (Apple Machine Learning Research). On current versions, Photos sits under Apps, which is the path Apple's support article and legal notice give (Apple Legal). You can turn it back on the same way at any time.

Apple writes separate steps for each kind of device and doesn't say that switching it off on one turns it off on the others. Do it on every iPhone, iPad, and Mac you use.

How do you turn off Enhanced Visual Search on a Mac?

In the Photos app, not System Settings (Apple):

1. Open the Photos app.
2. From the menu bar, choose Photos > Settings, and click General.
3. Under Search, uncheck Enhanced Visual Search.

The macOS 27 Golden Gate version of Apple's Photos guide lists it in the General pane, under a Search heading, with this description: "Allow Photos to privately match places in your photos with a global index maintained by Apple so you can search almost any landmark and point of interest" (Apple).

What is Enhanced Visual Search?

It's a Photos feature that finds landmarks in your library, so a search for "Golden Gate Bridge" or "Arc de Triomphe" shows every photo and video where it appears, even ones with no saved location. Apple says it started with iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, works in Photos and in Spotlight, and "isn't available in all countries or regions" (Apple).

It isn't Visual Look Up. Visual Look Up works on one photo at a time: you tap the starred Info button and then Look Up to learn about a landmark, plant, pet, or painting in that picture (Apple, iOS 27). Enhanced Visual Search runs across your whole library on its own, in the background.

What does Enhanced Visual Search send to Apple?

An encrypted mathematical summary of part of a photo, never the photo itself. Apple's support article says the feature "works without sending your photos or videos to Apple," and its research post describes each step. Read on November 7, 2026:

Apple's own post says "identifying the database shard relevant to the query could reveal sensitive information about the query itself," which is why the decoy requests and the relay exist. How the encrypted lookup works is covered in what is homomorphic encryption, and how a relay splits who you are from what you ask is in what is Oblivious HTTP.

Is Enhanced Visual Search a privacy risk?

No one has shown that it is. As of November 7, 2026, we couldn't find a published attack on it, and Apple's design gives its servers an encrypted query they can't read, from an IP address they don't see, mixed in with decoys. Apple's legal notice sums it up as preventing "Apple from learning about the information in your photos" (Apple Legal).

Something still leaves your device, though. You're trusting that Apple's code works as described, that no bug exposes more than intended, and that the relay operator and Apple never compare notes, a worry Johnson raised in his follow-up. You can't check any of that from an iPhone. If you never search your photos for landmarks, you lose nothing by turning it off.

Why did people turn off Enhanced Visual Search in December 2024?

Because it was on, and Apple hadn't asked, according to the developer who noticed. The timeline, from the primary sources:

• September 16, 2024: Apple released iOS 18 (Apple).
• October 24, 2024: Apple's Machine Learning Research team published how Enhanced Visual Search works (Apple ML).
• December 28, 2024: Jeff Johnson wrote that he had found "a new setting for Photos that was enabled by default," on his iPhone and on macOS Sequoia. "This choice was made by Apple, silently, without my consent," he wrote, adding, "I never wanted my iPhone to phone home to Apple" (Jeff Johnson).
• January 4, 2025: In a follow-up titled "Technology is never a substitute for consent," he said plainly, "I'm not claiming that Apple's privacy protection technology is flawed," and argued that consent is needed anyway (Jeff Johnson).

Johnson objected to the default and left the cryptography to the experts. As of November 7, 2026, Apple's legal notice says you can turn the feature off "at any time," but neither it nor the support article says whether it starts on or off.

What changes after you turn it off?

Searching Photos for a landmark by name stops getting help from Apple's index. The iOS 27 iPhone guide still lists places, business names, categories like "beach," and people you've named as things you can search for (Apple, iOS 27), and Apple pitches Enhanced Visual Search as the help for photos with no saved location.

Apple doesn't say whether landmark labels already written to your photos are removed when you switch the feature off. Its research post says each match is saved in "the photo's local metadata," which stays on your device either way.

Keeping what you make with AI on your own device

The fight over Enhanced Visual Search was about data leaving a device without the owner choosing it. Johnson put his view simply: "the only way to guarantee computing privacy is to not send data off the device" (Jeff Johnson). Morse is a chat app, not a photo library, and a message has to reach a model to get an answer, but what you've made stays on your device by default. Your chat history and the images you make in Studio are stored in your browser, encrypted, and Morse's servers don't keep your messages. There's no training setting to find, because Morse doesn't train AI on your content, sell your data, or show ads.

• E2EE, for anything no one else should read. Your browser checks the secure enclave's hardware attestation, then encrypts the message so only that enclave can read it, and Morse's servers relay ciphertext they can't read, much as Apple's servers handle an embedding they can't decrypt. It rests on the enclave hardware and attestation working as designed, and it comes with Pro, at $19 a month.
• Private, for everyday questions. A new chat starts here, with open-weight models like DeepSeek, Kimi, and GLM, and Morse has zero data retention agreements with its inference, search, and other providers, so they keep nothing.
• Anonymous, for GPT, Claude, and Gemini. Our proxy removes your account, email, and IP address, so the provider sees the message without knowing it's you. The provider may keep it for a limited time to check for abuse, under its own policy, so leave out details that point to you.

Because your chats and images sit in your browser, clearing it deletes them for good, and Morse can't recover them, so save anything you want to keep. Our privacy policy sets out the rest.

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