How to Correct Merged People Albums

by: léonie

Last modified: Aug 6, 2020 4:27 AM

18 4368 Last modified Aug 6, 2020 4:27 AM

Written for Photos 3.0 on High Sierra to Photos 5.0 on macOS 10.15.2 Catalina

The problem:

Occasionally, it can happen, that two persons get merged into one people album, even of the persons do not look alike at all. We have to be careful and check immediately, when we use the "Confirm additional faces" dialog. When I used the "confirm" tool I got surprising results. For some people photos has only shown me three faces to confirm, but then gave the message "automatically added 40 faces". If you are seeing such a message, check the album, if the automatically added faces are correct. And if Photos is showing you a wrong face to confirm, reject it and check the album of the wrong person, if it has become merged with the other person. Also, after an update I am occasionally seeing merged names on photos showing two people side-by-side. If Photos can only detect the face of one person, it might be using the name of the other person for the face.

Fixing this is difficult, if the names of the people are linked to their Contact cards. Photos remembers, that these two persons are the same, as long as you are using the same names as before and it is liked to the Contact. After rejecting an incorrect name with "this is not ..." and correcting it back to the name that got merged, Photos will merge the face right back into the wrong album.

How to fix it:

Let's assume, Photos has merged many faces of Minnie and Mickey into one People album, the album of Mickey.

First I would collect all photos of Minnie in a standard album. Open the People album of Mickey, switch the view to "Faces"and select all, select all with the wrong contact name in an album, so you can easily find them later.
- Open the People album for Mickey.
- Click "Faces" in the upper right corner, to be able to see the faces thumbnails, not just the full photos, or you would not be able to tell, which face has the name, if more than one person is in the photo.
- Click "Show More" below the title photo, to see all faces thumbnails.
- Now select the first wrong face of Minnie, hold down the key combination ⌘A to select more wrong faces by clicking them, until you have all wrong faces selected.
- Enter the key combination ⌘N to create a new album from the selection. Name this album "Minnie Faces"
- Now ctrl-click or right-click all selected Minnie faces and use the command "These are not Mickey" from the contextual menu.
- Now check the People Album of Minnie for wrong faces - collect them in another album "Mickey Faces" and reject them with "These are not Minnie".

Now you need to rename the rejected faces with a new name, that never has been used. When renaming the wrong faces, use a new name for the person, different from the first name. Use a nickname or similar. Do not use the name from the Contact card.

In the "View" menu enable "Show Face Names".
Now pen the new album "Minnie Faces" with the photos, that had wrong names from the sidebar.
View each photo enlarged.
Type the new name for Minnie into the name field below the faces circle, for example "Minnie New".
Rename the complete People Album of Minnie to "Minnie New" by typing the new name into the Title field.

I would also rename all photos of the first person to a different name, to move them to a new People album, to break the link between the two people.

Rename all faces of Mickey in a similar fashion, first the rejected photos in the album you created, then the complete Mickey People album.

The new names should now stay and not be changed back. I recommend to make a backup of the Photos library, after you fixed the names.

If your Photos Library is syncing with iCloud Photos, check, if the changed names have synced correctly to all other devices.

Once you have a backup of the fixed faces and the faces have not become merged again for a while, you could switch back to the name from the Contacts. The link to the Contacts is needed, if you want to use Siri to work with your Photos Library, for example, of you want to ask Siri "Show me Photos of my brother" or similar. Photos is using the Contacts also when creating Memories to find special places like "Daddy's Home" or birthdays.

German Version: Was tun, wenn Fotos die Personenalben für zwei Personen vermischt hat? - Apple Community