How does the 'faces' feature on the mac photos app handle tagging childhood photos?

I have a photo library full of photos of my friends, family, myself as adults. What if I were to import childhood photos of these individuals and tag them using the same tag I used for them as adults?


  • Does Photos' Faces algorithms understand that people's faces change (to the extend of a childhood photo)? Or would a childhood photo be a different 'face'?
  • Will using the same 'face' tag for the childhood and adult photos cause the 'digital faceprint' of these tags to break? (As machine learning could incorrectly interpret the face now as a some sort of child/adult hybrid...)


Why am I asking this?

  • I don't want to create a separate library for childhood photos.
  • I don't want the Photos app to no longer recognise the adult faces of these individuals in newly imported photos as time goes by, simply because I happened to tag some childhood photos of them.


Thanks

AJ

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jun 15, 2020 9:50 AM

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Posted on Jun 15, 2020 12:33 PM

I never had problems, when I tagged all faces of a person with the same name, from the first pictures as a toddler to a very old adult. I tagged all old family scans with an approximately correct date. but I am not sure, if Photos is using the dates to estimate the age of a person.

Photos does not use manually added faces to learn what a person looks like, only the faces that photos has detected automatically. So you can even mark the back of a head as person and assign a name, it will not spoil the automatic face recognition.


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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 15, 2020 12:33 PM in response to alexjake_

I never had problems, when I tagged all faces of a person with the same name, from the first pictures as a toddler to a very old adult. I tagged all old family scans with an approximately correct date. but I am not sure, if Photos is using the dates to estimate the age of a person.

Photos does not use manually added faces to learn what a person looks like, only the faces that photos has detected automatically. So you can even mark the back of a head as person and assign a name, it will not spoil the automatic face recognition.


Jun 15, 2020 10:00 AM in response to alexjake_

Actually the facial recognition works pretty good. It's found most of the faces of each family member from childhood to adulthood. With each I've had to go into the People section and use the additional faces option to verify if found faces belong to that person or not.


It will help to select several child faces and identify them with the right person.


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How does the 'faces' feature on the mac photos app handle tagging childhood photos?

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