Q: Is there any easy way to remove Faces metadata?
I won't get into my frustrations of moving from iPhoto to Photos, but it brought over with it a bunch of inaccurately marked faces. Is there any easy way to remove all the faces metadata from all my photos so I can start from scratch? Thanks
Posted on Jun 27, 2016 9:22 AM
Can you tell us more about the libraries you migrated to Photos? You said you migrated iPhoto libraries - did you perhaps also use Aperture? If you opened your iPhoto libraries in Aperture you may have written metadata into the original image files. Then nothing you can do in Photos can remove the wrong tags, since they will be stored with the original files.
Photos has no built-in tool to start over with the face recognition.
There is no way to delete all recognized faces at once.
The problem is, that Photos is scanning for faces only once, when you import the photos.
If you delete the faces circle from a photo, Photos will not scan that photo again, unless you reimport it. You would have to manually add faces circles, but the manually added faces will not be used for the face recognition.
What you could do, but it would be a lot of work: open the faces album and delete all names from the name tags below each faces tile. That should move the named faces thumbnails back to the row of suggested faces and you can start over,
You could wait with this major reorganization for the macOS Sierra release coming this fall. As you could see during the WWDC 2016 presentation, The faces albums will be completely redesigned. Labelling faces will probably easier with the next release.
Posted on Jun 27, 2016 11:01 AM