I have a 15 ProMax and have been tagging my photos with names for people and pets. I upgraded to iOS 26 Tonight as I was going through I noticed that all my tags disappeared. YEARS of photos with all the tags empty as if they have never been tagged. Is there any way to recover?
iPhone 15 Pro Max, iOS 26
when you install major system upgrade, the algorithm for the face detection and face recognition will usually also be updated and changed, so Photos needs to scan all photos and videos again for faces and recognize identical faces. usually most of the already named faces will be found again, but Photos may find some additional faces, and some may not be recognized again. Just wait and see, as Richard recommended. probably the named faces will alb back in a few days.
Face ID requires days to complete. How long have you waited?
If you don't use iCloud Photos, but you have Settings>Apple ID>iCloud Backup turned on, then you may be able to recover data from the last 30 days or so. You should look here:
Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from a backup - Apple Support
“Restore” is what you do when you buy a new phone, so this safety, if you have it set, requires you to erase everything on your phone and replace it with the backup. This will take you back to the iOS of the backup.
If you don't keep your own backups to an external drive, then that is your only option.
Photo tags (pets and faces) deleted
