How to Use HomeKit Secure Video Face Recognition to Know Who’s at Your Door

Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video is a compelling choice thanks to its generous iCloud+ storage plan. The platform also offers face recognition, which can try to identify the people who appear on your smart home cameras or video doorbells.

What Is HomeKit Secure Video Face Recognition?

HomeKit Secure Video is a feature of Apple’s smart home ecosystem that allows you to store recordings from your smart home cameras and video doorbells in iCloud. You need an iCloud+ subscription, and you also need to set up an Apple device as a home hub to process and analyze the video and allow you to access your recordings when you’re away from home.

You can use an Apple TV 4K, a HomePod, or even an iPad, although the tablet isn’t supported as a home hub on the upgraded version of the Home app.

Apple HomePod (2nd generation)

You also need a compatible smart home camera or video doorbell. This needs to be a product that explicitly supports HomeKit Secure Video, although there are workarounds if your camera or doorbell isn’t supported. Supported products include the Aqara Video Doorbell G4, the Logitech Circle View Doorbell, and the WeMo Smart Video Doorbell.

Logitech Circle View Wired Video Doorbell

HomeKit Secure Video includes features such as motion detection for people, animals, vehicles, and packages, but it also includes a face recognition feature. This compares the faces that are captured on your smart cameras to faces that have been tagged in the Photos app. All the analysis takes place locally on your home hub device; none of the data is sent to Apple’s servers.

If a face is recognized, the name is included in the motion alert notification so you can see instantly who is at your front door or in your home. You also have the option to mute notifications from recognized faces. Instead of getting an alert every time your significant other comes home or leaves the house, you only get notifications when an unrecognized person arrives.

How to Enable Face Recognition in the Home App

If you want to use face recognition, once you’ve set up your camera with HomeKit Secure Video, you need to turn the face recognition feature on. You can do so within the accessory settings for your camera. Face recognition won’t work unless you have people recognition turned on for your camera.

Open the Home app and tap and hold the thumbnail for your camera. Select “Accessory Settings.” Scroll down and select “Face Recognition.” Toggle “Face Recognition” on. Select your library and choose “Only Me” or “Everyone in this Home” to grant access to recognized faces from your Photos library.

Whenever a face is recognized as matching a named person in your Photos app, the motion alert notification will include the name of whom the person might be.

How to Tag Unrecognized Faces in HomeKit Secure Video

If someone is captured on your camera who isn’t recognized as matching anyone from your Photos app, they will appear in the list of recent faces in your Home app without a name. You then have the option to tag the person with a name or description if they’re someone who appears regularly. For example, you might tag the mail carrier as “mail guy” so you can either be alerted when they’re detected or completely stop notifications for that specific person.

Tap and hold your camera in the Home app and select “Accessory Settings.” Scroll down and select “Face Recognition.” Select a face from the “Recent” list that is marked as “Add Name.”

Tap “Add Name,” and choose a person from your Photos library, or enter a name or descriptive phrase for the person. Their face should now be recognized using the name or description you’ve used in the future. You may also see an option to tag a face in a notification. If so, you can tap Add to Known Visitors to be taken directly to the relevant page of the Home app, where you can add the visitor’s name or description.

How to Mute Notifications for Recognized Faces

If you’re using HomeKit Secure Video with your video doorbell, it can be very useful to know who is at the door when you receive a notification from the Home app. That way, you can decide whether you’re fine to answer the door in your bathrobe or whether you really need to throw on some clothes.

However, you may not want to get bombarded with notifications every time other members of your household come in and out. If so, you can hide notifications for recognized faces. With this setting turned on, if that person is recognized, you won’t receive a notification from the Home app like you usually would, although it’s only possible to hide notifications for people who have recently been detected.

Tap and hold your camera in the Home app and choose “Accessory Settings.” Select “Face Recognition.” Tap on a recognized person, and toggle “Hide Notifications” on. You will no longer receive notifications when this person is recognized. Repeat the process for any other people that you want to hide notifications for.

Tagging People in the Photos App

HomeKit Secure Video can recognize people who have been tagged with a name in the Photos app, but if you haven’t given the person a name, they won’t be recognized. You can add names to additional people in the Photos app.

Open Photos and open the “People” section. If you can’t find it because you’ve reorganized the Photos app to stop it looking so awful, you can access it through the Home app. Tap and hold your camera, select “Accessory Settings,” and tap “Face Recognition.” Select your library and tap “Add Names in Photos.”

Once you’re in the People section of the Photos app, you’ll see all the people that are currently tagged. To tag more people, scroll to the bottom of the screen and tap “Add People.” Select the person or people that you want to add and tap “Add.”

Once they’ve been added to the “People” page, select a person and tap “Name This Person.” Give the person a name and repeat for anyone else that you want to tag.

Once people have been tagged in the People section of the Photos app, they can be recognized by name in HomeKit Secure Video.

Tips for Improving Face Recognition

Face recognition isn’t perfect, especially when you first start using it. Even if someone is tagged in your Photos app, they may not be recognized and may appear without a name in the list of recently detected people. However, if this happens, all you need to do is select them from the list and tag them with the correct person. If you do this a few times, you should find that the person is recognized from then on.

You may also find that faces aren’t recognized due to poor camera placement or lighting conditions. If the face is too dark or is captured from a strange angle, it’s less likely that it will be recognized correctly. Try to ensure that when you install your video doorbell, it has adequate lighting and is optimally placed to get the best face recognition results.

Face recognition in HomeKit Secure Video lets you know instantly if the person at the door is someone you know, without you needing to take a look at the video feed. It’s also a great way to ignore unwanted visitors but be at home for people you know.

The other benefit is that you can block notifications for people in your household so that you don’t get a notification every time you or anyone else in your home comes in or out. It’s an effective way to reduce the overload of notifications that your iPhone can throw at you.