Faces functionality is terrible. Photos is worse than iPhoto, and there seems to be no concern about that from Apple.

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Level 1

11 points

Faces functionality is terrible. Photos is worse than iPhoto, and there seems to be no concern about that from Apple.

Faces was added to iPhotos at least a decade ago. It was great. Auto-identification wasn't the best, but the functionality for adding faces was useful, directed by the user, and progressively improved the collection.

The current functionality is ridiculously bad. The auto-recognition finds only a few photos, then gives up and says "there don't appear to be any additional photos". In fact there are many more photos of the individual. The user cannot direct the search in any way. All that can be done is to manually add faces to a photo. Even when obvious and unobstructed, Photos doesn't even know faces exist in a picture. "Faces" is terrible, and so much worse than iPhoto that the mind boggles.

Why has Apple allowed this formerly very useful feature to become effectively worthless. Photos from its inception has been a downgrade from iPhotos.

The only thing that seems to change in Photos is the file format, which requires the library to be updated -- without warning or option. Open the application and, hey!, you get to wait for 5 to 50 minutes or more before you are able to use it. How is that considered to be acceptable?

Apple software...it's decent when released, then abandoned to languish in mediocrity.

Posted on Jan 1, 2020 6:05 PM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

200,699 points

Jan 1, 2020 10:52 PM in response to rawitten

There is one big difference between iPhoto and Photos. iPhoto has been designed to be used as a stand-alone application, but the successor "Photos" has been designed to work with iCloud. The faces are syncing with iCloud across all your Apple Device, independent of the system version. This requires a lot of extra processing to solve conflicts between named faces from different devices and update the faces across devices. Photos is also scanning for faces in the videos and Live Photos, which needs a lot of processing.

How are you using the Face detection? Which system version is installed on your Mac?

And how are you looking for faces to name?

On my Macs the initial faces scan on macOS 10.15 Catalina has found most of the faces, as I can clearly see, when I enable the overlay of the faces circles, so I can see all detected faces when I view a photo enlsarged. Have you enabled this in the View menu? "View > Show Faces"?

Photos 5.0 on Catalina will scan any new photos for faces, recognise identical faces and create People albums for them. But it will not automatically add the new faces to the People album. The new people albums will be hidden, until you add them to the People album. The reason for this is, that there may be many strangers in the background, that would clutter up the People album, so Photos is waiting for you to add the people you are interested in.

Try the following:

In Photos, go to the main menu bar and enable the option "View > Show Faces"
Open one of the new photos with unnamed faces and view it enlarged. If there is a faces circle, scroll down to the details section. If there is a faces thumbnail, click it to open the hidden album for this person. At the bottom of the album should be an option to add this album to the People album. Add this album, then name it.

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Faces functionality is terrible. Photos is worse than iPhoto, and there seems to be no concern about that from Apple.

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