Apple Intelligence for Photos Tested: Is It Better Than Google Photos?

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Apple Intelligence features are now available for select iPhones, iPads, and Macs. The list of tools in this first rollout is rather limited: You'll find some new writing functions, notification summaries, and a revitalized version of Siri, among a few other things.

We're pretty excited about the changes to Apple Photos, which finally catches up to Google Photos to a degree. In iOS 18.1, Apple Photos gets a fresh design that surfaces new collections and is more customizable. Regarding AI, Apple says, "With Apple Intelligence, search for just about anything, remove visual distractions with a tap, and create the memories you want to see." Just how well does it work? And how does it stack up against Google Photos, which already offers many of these features? We put it to the test.

Search

If you're anything like me, you have tens of thousands of photos stored in your library. My Apple Photo library contains somewhere north of 70,000 photos, screenshots, and videos. Sorting through them to find the perfect photo can be a real pain—but not with Apple Intelligence.

One of Apple Intelligence's major benefits is its ability to parse natural language. This means you don't have to stick to the stultifying, robot-like syntax we've relied on when asking Siri to do anything in the past. Now, it's easier to find any photo or group of photos in your library.

Open the Apple Photos app and tap the search icon at the top-right corner. A dialog box appears where you can type or speak your query. I started with, "Show me pictures of guitars." Because I attend a lot of rock concerts, Apple Photos surfaced hundreds of photos I've taken of people playing guitar. It also included a few photos I've taken of my own guitars. Neat!

Subsequent searches for "The Empire State Building," "Show my photos from Lake Placid," and "Cars" turned up all the relevant images I've taken over the decades.

Google Photos has been able to perform basic searches using the standard search bar for years, so you can type or speak simple queries like "cars" or "guitars" and get decent results. It now also supports natural language processing. I performed the exact same searches in Google Photos using a Pixel 9 Pro and got the same results as above.

Create

When it comes to creating, Apple Photos takes some cues from your searches. For example, atop the image results for my query about guitars, Apple Photos created several slideshows of photos I've taken at specific shows.

Crazily enough, Apple Photos selected a track from fretboard wiz Joe Satriani to accompany the photo montage it created of Joe himself playing a show! A small tool at the bottom of the screen lets you comb through your music library to pick and choose your own soundtrack. Of course, sharing the Memory as a slideshow or video is just a tap away.

Google Photos has had a similar feature for years. It culls your images in the background and presents them to you every so often when you open the app. For example, I recently visited a nature preserve in the New Jersey Meadowlands to take photos of birds. I uploaded some of my shots to Google Photos. A day or so later, I checked the Memories tab in Google Photos, and it had collected a number of the shots together and created a short slideshow, though without background music.

Clean Up

While those features are useful and fun, I suspect most people will enjoy "cleaning up" their photos. Apple Intelligence takes a page from Google's Magic Eraser tool with its Clean Up function.

In the Photos app, open a photo you want to edit. The new Clean Up tool appears alongside the standard set of editing tools. Tap it, and Apple Photos demonstrates how to erase unwanted objects from the background by scribbling your finger over them. It also suggests items to erase by making them glow briefly, like someone's forearm that entered one of my shots and a bench that I hadn't noticed. Scribble away, and Apple Intelligence needs but a second or two to erase the object(s) and seamlessly fill in the background.

It works like a charm. In fact, it feels slightly more polished than Google's Magic Eraser. I've seen Google's tool make a mess of the background, not erase the entire object or leave other traces that an edit was made. In the limited number of photos I edited, Apple Photos delivered cleaner results. If you like editing photos, this new tool is certainly going to help with some of your shots. Magic Eraser in Google Photos can take out larger objects than Apple Photos can, for the moment. Whichever you use, deleting stray people or garbage cans from the background makes your photos more enjoyable to share.

iOS 18.1 is a free download. Later this year, Apple plans to add more features to Apple Intelligence through iOS 18.2, with more tools to follow in 2025.