If your phone’s camera roll has become an unsearchable mess of thousands of photos and screenshots, new and existing tools on iPhone, Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel devices can make finding a specific picture much faster.
Apple’s iOS 27 lets users add their own keywords to individual photos. Rather than scrolling through months of images, people can search for a word they’ve attached to a picture and pull it up instantly. The feature is useful for things like a photo of an airport parking spot or an appliance’s model number, where the phone’s automatic recognition of people, pets, places and objects doesn’t capture why the picture actually matters.
On an iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 27, keywords can be managed by going to Photos, then Collections, then the profile icon, then Manage Keywords. From there, users can rename or delete keywords or mark frequently used ones as favorites.
One suggested approach is to start only with photos that are genuinely hard to find later, such as important documents, appliance labels or travel information, rather than tagging an entire photo library at once.
Samsung Galaxy: manual tags and albums
Samsung Galaxy phones allow similar manual tagging through the built-in Gallery app. Users can assign their own keywords to photos and search for them later, though the exact location of the tagging controls can vary by Galaxy model and Gallery version. On some versions, tapping Edit within a photo’s details brings up the option to add a tag; if that option isn’t visible, the Gallery app may need an update.
Once a photo is tagged, it can be found again using the Gallery’s search feature — for example, tagging pictures of home appliances with their model names, then searching for that tag when a serial number or replacement part is needed later.
Albums are another option for grouping related pictures, such as a single album for home repairs containing paint colors, appliance labels and receipts.
Google Pixel: automatic recognition
Google Pixel phones take a different route. Instead of relying on manually added keywords, Google Photos uses automatic recognition to surface images based on their content. Searching for a term like
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