A proper edge coloring of a graph G without isolated edges is neighbor‐distinguishing if any two adjacent vertices have distinct sets consisting of colors of their incident edges. The neighbor‐distinguishing index of G is the minimum number ndi(G) of colors in a neighbor‐distinguishing edge coloring of G. Zhang, Liu, and Wang in 2002 conjectured that ndi (G)≤Δ(G)+2 if G is a connected graph of order at least 6. In this article, the conjecture is verified for planar graphs with maximum degree at least 12.