How to use Keywords to Back Up the Named Faces in Photos and Improve the Search for People
The People album is a great tool to browse the photos of our contacts in one place. Keywords can make it even easier to use the named faces and also save our work in naming the faces in a more stable way.
How to add the name as a keyword to all photos of a person:
To add the name of a person to all photos of a person open the People album for the person,
- the click "Show More" to show all detected faces
- and select them all at once with ⌘A.
- Now open the Info for the selected photos with ⌘I or clicking the (i) button in the toolbar
- and then enter the keyword into the "Add a Keyword" field.
The advantages:
- A better Info: The full name of the person is now clearly visible in the Info of a photo, even if we do to open the photo enlarged, to be able to see the faces circles with the names. Without the keyword, we would only see a cute thumbnail of the face, but the Info does not tell us, what the person is called. We would have to click the thumbnail to open the People album. For some pople the People album will only show the short name, and we would still not know the name.
- We can filter by the keyword names: Keywords are in Photos more versatile than other text, if they are in the Quick Group of the Keyword Browser. Then we can use them to filter the currently displayed photos (albums or smart albums, All Photos) by the keywords. For example, if we are viewing an album, we can click the "Showing" filter and select the keyword with the name of the person to show only the photos of they person in the album.
- The filters are especially powerful, when filtering smart albums further. In the smart album we can search for "Person is A" or "person is B" and then filter by the keyword for "Person C". A smart album alone would not suffice to combine rules with and one or at the same time.
- After a major upgrade of Photos, when the face recognition algorithm has been updated as well, we may have to confirm or name many faces again. Having the names saved in metadata fields, that can survive a changed face detection algorithms, the keywords will help to get this done consistently and faster than having to do it from scratch. Worse, the information, what a person is called may be lost completely, if it has not been saved in the title, keywords, or description and we have forgotten the the name. Sometimes it is just hard to remember the name of a person, we have only met a few times and not seen in a long time. So the keywords are our safety line and backup of the faces names, when Photos is discarding the face information. The keywords will usually survive the upgrade of Photos to a new version, but the named faces and albums are less stable.
- Keywords can save the names, if the face recognition should confuse the faces of two people and merge their People album. With the help of keywords we can check for incorrectly named faces with a smart album: Match all: Face is person A and keyword is not Person A.
- Keywords are embedded, when we export a photo, so we can transfer them and archive them with backup copies. And the keywords will help, when we want to migrate the Photos Library to a more professional DAM.
- Keywords will sync with iCloud Photos even to devices with older system versions, that do not yet support the syncing of Faces.
The face keywords may seem to be redundant information, but they will help us to search for people more efficiently in smart albums, to fix merged people albums, to restore the named faces more quickly, when the face detection and face recognition algorithm get updated. I like this additional safety line.