Identifying Faces on Mac - Face circle disappears when attempting to drag it (Catalina)

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Identifying Faces on Mac - Face circle disappears when attempting to drag it (Catalina)

I am trying to add people to my people album on my Mac Pro running Catalina 10.15.1

I have about 30k photos in my library. There are many many photos where Photos did not recognize faces. When I try to add a face :

open a photo
click the (i) to open the info popup
click the (+) beside add faces

Photos puts the circle on the photo near the top right corner of the photo.

When I try to drag it around the face I want to add, it either disappears completely, or it snaps back to its starting place, or it snaps to some other random place, but it never will remain around the face I am trying to tag.

On photos where Photos has identified people, I can add face tags to other faces in the photo. But if there are no faces identified, I get the behaviour outlined above. I am not talking about fuzzy or incomplete faces - these are clear photos with good quality faces visible.

I should add that I have been rebuilding my Photos library, importing the photos again. Many of these photos had properly identified people in an older version of photos - when the feature was called Faces rather than people. I may have 20 photos taken during the same time period by the same camera - a few of them will have faces identified, some don't, and those that don't refuse to let me add them.

This is really frustrating....

I have restarted Photos and my Mac many times, and even updated to the latest OS release hoping that might help.... but nothing I've tried changes the behaviour at all.

Anyone got any advice?

Posted on Oct 30, 2019 9:03 AM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

197,315 points

Oct 30, 2019 11:58 AM in response to ONCanada

You may want to test, if the faces are only jumping around in your current Photos Library, or also, if you create a small test library (Create additional photo libraries in Photos on Mac - Apple Support). If the problem does not occur in a new test library, a library repair may help, see: Repair your library in Photos on Mac - Apple Support.

If the faces keep jumping and vanishing in a new library, check, if the problem is system wide by testing in a new user account: How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac - Apple Support

If the same happens in a new user account, back up the mac and reinstall the system: This is quickly done from the Recovery partition: About macOS Recovery - Apple Support

If reinstalling does not help, Report the problem to Apple. You can use the feedback form: Feedback - Photos - Apple

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

197,315 points

Oct 30, 2019 11:12 AM in response to ONCanada

I have been seeing the same behaviour - the faces circle jumping back to the center of the photo, as soon as I am tring to enter a name.

What is usually working for me ist to type the name into the textfield below the circle, while it is in the center, and only then dragging it to the correct face. This is useful, if other face labels would be occluding the textfield where I am typing the name.

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Answer 3

ONCanada Author

Level 1

10 points

Oct 30, 2019 11:22 AM in response to léonie

Thanks so much for trying to help me out. Unfortunately it doesn't work for me. I can type the name into the textfield, but as soon as I try to drag it to the face, it disappears completely, and the thumbnail image shows whatever random pixels were under the circle when I applied the name. Clicking on the thumbnail does not make it appear again.

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Answer 4

Oct 31, 2019 2:05 AM in response to ONCanada

I have experienced similar, possibly related, behaviour where the circle snaps to a different location automatically. I am still running Mojave. My impression, and it is only a guess, is that Photos moves the circle where it believes the nearest face is in the photo. In other words, t doesn't honour the location where you drag the circle too but, rather, adjusts it because it thinks it knows better.

I say this because it only has happened to me when I drag the circle over a real face in the photo. Then the circle only "snaps" to a new location that is very close to where I manually drag the circle to.

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Answer 5

ONCanada Author

Level 1

10 points

Nov 2, 2019 10:03 AM in response to léonie

Hi léonie

Thanks very much for the help.

As you suggested I created a small test library that contained only a few photos that were causing issues in my main library. They worked just fine.

So I ran a repair / restore on my main library. Then waited 2 days for it to rescan all my photos. Now the photos that had the issues appear to be working fine and I haven't (yet) found any where the faces circles are acting flaky.

Thanks again for the suggestions :-)