Saving Face Names for Geneology

(It's spelled Genealogy, but I can't edit the title!)

Here's the thing--Face recognition is quite volatile. Because the algorithm keeps changing (and improving, I hope,) face names are always subject to re-evaluation. Major updates may, in any case, re-scan pictures with a new idea of what makes a face unique, so it can start all over again. Face IDs are not especially transferrable metadata, since there is no standard., (A list of names may or may not be included, but not which face goes with which name.) I'm not sure there is anything to preserve with face recognition. We shouldn't depend on them for anything really important.

Many of us use face recognition to help us add keywords to identifiable people. Keywords are a standard part of metadata, and they transfer with the pictures. I open the People Album for my Aunt Bonnie, select all, and add the keyword "AuntBonnie" to them all. Then, if I find other pictures with Aunt Bonnie in them, and even if it's the back of her head or for some other reason not recognized by Photos, I add the keyword. Then, if the face recognition gets disrupted, I can use a Smart Album to collect all the Bonnies to together, again. And don't worry about full names. I use Richard for me, and Richard C for an uncle, and so on. Short names are really better in pictures.

Full names can go in the Caption field where there's room for long names. For relatives, I put in the full name with birth and death dates. I'll even say Richard's Father's Mother, or something like that. With option-return, you can start a new line, though this doesn't always translate to other media. The cool thing here is that, while iPhones and iPads don't do Keywords or Titles, and face names are really flaky, they do show the captions.

Furthermore, you can print (or save as a pdf file) a Contact Sheet that has the captions on it, like this:

Then you can send them to relatives and ask for input.

The contact sheet is one of the great under-discovered gems of Photos! 

Captions are a bit of a pain, because there's so little room in the Info Window. But you can type information in Notes or someplace, and then copy and paste. 

Searches in captions work pretty well in Photos on the Mac. If I type "(1862-1929)" into the search field, I get pictures of my wife's great grandfather. If I double click to expand his  picture and then scroll down to the "Explore" section, it shows me a link to his Person Album, and I can see all the other pictures of Grandpa Virgil.

By the way, adding name tags manually puts people into their Person Album along with the Photos-recognized pictures. But manually added names don't help in future IDs. Labeling the back of my wife's head puts that picture in her album, but it doesn't make all the backs of all the heads ID as her. 

Face tags are especially useful in those pictures of bunches of people you can't remember.

Just a list of names isn't good enough--I know because that's what's on the backs of pictures that I had to use to identify these folks. For some old pictures like this, I made a screenshot to preserve the names with the faces without depending on Face recognition in the future. And, except for the babies like my mother, it works as a good reference when I find other pictures.

Another user here, léonie, starts face names with classifications, like RsFam:Aunt Bonnie. That puts all my family pictures together, separate from my wife's family or friends. That's very clever, but I haven't made that jump, yet.