I had added people’s names to all of my 29,000 pictures in Photo. When I upgraded to Catalina, hundreds of names I had added were removed and either changed to unnamed or were not identified as a face at all. Has anyone else had this problem and if so what did you do to restore the names. Will each new upgrade cause names to be removed again?
MacBook Air 13", macOS 10.15
This can happen, whenever the algorithm for the face detection and face recognition has been updated and improved. I have it seen after every major system upgrade. The updated face recognition may detect the faces in a slightly changed location, and then Photos will wait for you to confirm the detected faces again. I would wait with doing anything about the named people, until Photos has scanned the faces scan. This may take several days for a large library like yours.
Then open each album in the People album in turn and use the command "Confirm Additional faces" at the bottom of the People album. You will see all recognised faces there, that need a confirmation.
in rare cases photos may have mixed up two people. I noticed in my library, that Photos 5 does not name the clearly recognised faces, if there is a conflict in one of the photos. Photos 5 cannot assign the same name to two different people in the same photo. If Photos assigned the name Minnie to the face of Mickey, it is now stuck and cannot name Minnie in the same photo "Minnie" and no further photos of Minnie will be named. .In such cases it helps to check the automatically assigned names and to correct mismatched automatically assigned names. Then Photos will be able to name further photos automatically.
I am using keywords in addition to naming the faces. For each People album I assign a keyword with the name of the person to all photos in the album of this person. This makes it easy to detect incorrectly naked faces or to recreate the People album after an update: How to use Keywords to Back Up the Named Faces in Photos and Improve the Search for People … - Apple Community
This can happen, whenever the algorithm for the face detection and face recognition has been updated and improved. I have it seen after every major system upgrade. The updated face recognition may detect the faces in a slightly changed location, and then Photos will wait for you to confirm the detected faces again. I would wait with doing anything about the named people, until Photos has scanned the faces scan. This may take several days for a large library like yours.
Then open each album in the People album in turn and use the command "Confirm Additional faces" at the bottom of the People album. You will see all recognised faces there, that need a confirmation.
in rare cases photos may have mixed up two people. I noticed in my library, that Photos 5 does not name the clearly recognised faces, if there is a conflict in one of the photos. Photos 5 cannot assign the same name to two different people in the same photo. If Photos assigned the name Minnie to the face of Mickey, it is now stuck and cannot name Minnie in the same photo "Minnie" and no further photos of Minnie will be named. .In such cases it helps to check the automatically assigned names and to correct mismatched automatically assigned names. Then Photos will be able to name further photos automatically.
I am using keywords in addition to naming the faces. For each People album I assign a keyword with the name of the person to all photos in the album of this person. This makes it easy to detect incorrectly naked faces or to recreate the People album after an update: How to use Keywords to Back Up the Named Faces in Photos and Improve the Search for People … - Apple Community
Problem with Photo automatically removing people’s names in Photo
