kah123

Q: Is there a way to rescan for faces?

I just started using Photos. I imported a lot of photos into the app and expected it to automatically detect faces and display them on the Albums > Faces page, but that page is completely blank.  Faces do show up in the "Suggested Faces" section on that page and I can go through the process to detect those manually but that's way too much work.  I'd like to find a way to get Photos to scan the entire photo library and automatically detect faces.  Is there a way to do that?

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013), OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on May 25, 2015 6:49 AM

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Q: Is there a way to rescan for faces?

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  • by R C-R,

    R C-R R C-R May 25, 2015 6:55 AM in response to kah123
    Level 6 (17,633 points)
    May 25, 2015 6:55 AM in response to kah123

    No, there is no way to automatically do that. If you migrated (not the same as imported) an iPhoto Library into Photos when you started up Photos, any faces identified in iPhoto would have been migrated as well, but Photos has to have some identified faces for anything to display in the identified section of the Faces album.

  • by kah123,

    kah123 kah123 May 25, 2015 7:47 AM in response to R C-R
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 25, 2015 7:47 AM in response to R C-R

    Ah, so Photos doesn't support automatic face detection at all.  Is that right?  I have to do this manually?

  • by R C-R,

    R C-R R C-R May 25, 2015 8:53 AM in response to kah123
    Level 6 (17,633 points)
    May 25, 2015 8:53 AM in response to kah123

    Photos supports face detection in the same way iPhoto does. It attempts to identify face shapes in photos, but it is up to the user to decide if they are real faces & if so to tell the app whose face it is -- just as humans can identify faces but not know what name to associate them with without some other point of reference, no app can do that.

     

    So in effect, the "Suggested Faces" feature is more or less equivalent to a human asking another person what their name is -- once that is known, it becomes easier to associate the same face with the same name when seen elsewhere. Once you start adding names to faces in a few photos, the Photos app will ask you if faces in other photos are those of the same person, & if you confirm that they are, will automatically add those photos to that person's group in the face circles in the upper part of the Faces album. But that's the extent of the automation -- it just adds photos to the list for that person.

  • by DanInDub,

    DanInDub DanInDub Feb 15, 2016 11:40 AM in response to kah123
    Level 3 (640 points)
    Feb 15, 2016 11:40 AM in response to kah123

    Each photo is scanned upon import.

     

    However, if for whatever reason it's not (or for example, if you deleted faces originally and would like to re-scan photo) you need to edit it.

     

    The fastest way I could find is to select all photos you want to re-scan, and do "Rotate clockwise" and then "Rotate counterclockwise". That will cause photos to re-scan photos you rotated for Faces.

     

    Good luck,

    Dan

  • by GrantBus,

    GrantBus GrantBus Jun 23, 2016 10:26 PM in response to kah123
    Level 1 (4 points)
    iPad
    Jun 23, 2016 10:26 PM in response to kah123

    Right click the photo and select Get Info

    Any detected faces will show in circles towards the bottom ... to the right of the list is a + sign to add faces, if nothing's been detected just click the + and drag and expand the circles to cover the face, and add the name which should autocomplete.

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Jun 23, 2016 11:12 PM in response to GrantBus
    Level 10 (105,736 points)
    iLife
    Jun 23, 2016 11:12 PM in response to GrantBus
    just click the + and drag and expand the circles to cover the face, and add the name which should autocomplete.

    The manually added faces circles are second-class. Photos will not use them to recognize a person. I would not start naming faces in a photo until Photos has had enough time to recognize all faces automatically, that it can detect. I wait a day or two before I name the faces in recently imported photos and let the mac run over night to give Photos enough time to run the background processes for faces detection.