face syncing in photos

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face syncing in photos

Hi. I accidentally dragged my photos library to a different folder on my hard drive (I had meant to copy it to an external hard drive, and my finger slipped). First of all, when I dragged it back, it was very difficult to get it to copy back properly, involving restarting a few times and recovery mode. But secondly, all my recognized faces had now disappeared.

Of course I'm quite frustrated about that, but I'm also curious — the face recognition is still there on my iOS devices, all the faces I'd had — so shouldn't iCloud be syncing those up? I'd think this would be quick, and the Mac would have all those faces again, but the Mac has been telling me it has zero faces scanned for hours.

Any way then to encourage iCloud to sync the face recognition data between iOS and macOS?

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.14

Posted on Feb 23, 2019 1:13 AM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

195,191 points

Feb 23, 2019 6:44 AM in response to bldonnell

The syncing of faces with iCloud will start, once the face detection has completed on your Mac.

Then you should be seeing the suggested faces from iCloud, when you open one of the albums for a person and look at "confirm additional faces".

Instead of dragging the Photos Library back and syncing it again with iCloud, it might have been quicker to create a new, empty library on your Mac in the Pictures folder and to enable it as your iCloud Photos Library. This would have save the upload to iCloud. The library would just download from iCloud to your Mac and you would have saved the merging with the existing library.

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Answer 2

bldonnell Author

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10 points

Feb 23, 2019 4:13 PM in response to léonie

Thank you for your quick replies!

One last question....I've created a new photo library and turned on iCloud for it, and made it the system library. Won't get rid of the other one til this one is updated, and I've backed up the old one as well. Question: is it better to have Photos OPEN for iCloud to update the new library, or is it better to CLOSE Photos?

I've heard various things...some say it's better to leave it on but in the background, and others that it only happens when it's closed.

Thanks!

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Answer 3

bldonnell Author

Level 1

10 points

Feb 23, 2019 11:42 AM in response to léonie

Ah, OK! Well...I've seemed to be having trouble with a corrupted library....would it be best then just to create a new one and let iCloud repopulate it? Will it keep all my folders and albums?

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Answer 4

léonie

Level 10

195,191 points

Feb 23, 2019 12:10 PM in response to bldonnell

When you create a new, empty Photos Library, all albums and folders should download from iCloud.

But I would keep a backup copy of your current library - better safe than sorry.

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face syncing in photos

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