Update Photos v4 to Photos v6, or update to Photos v5 first?

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Level 1

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Update Photos v4 to Photos v6, or update to Photos v5 first?

So I have spent a long time updating all my photos in Mojave with keywords and face tags for all pictures. The library has over 40k pictures. I have not updated to Catalina on my main computer (iMac Pro) because of all the issues reported with Catalina.

I did test on another Mac updating to Catalina and much to my frustration I see that Photos v5 rescans all the faces. Why in the world is Apple doing this on faces that it has already automatically identified or I have manually add faces and added the correct name.

Now I have to accept and confirm the named faces all over again, and manually add faces it can't recognize. This is going to take a very long time to check and fix every picture

So the question for this community is should I just suck it up and do this, or should I just skip Photos v5 Catalina and just go to Photos v6 in Big Sur

Any benefits to going from v4 to v5 to v6? Less work? Safer?... Or is it less work, better face recognition going from v4 to v6?

iMac Pro

Posted on Feb 11, 2021 9:55 PM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

197,279 points

Feb 12, 2021 3:26 AM in response to Jadeviper

Photos 5 and 6 are more similar than the leap from Photos 4 to Photos 5. But the Big Sur upgrade will again scan for faces, whether you upgrade from Photos 4 or Photos 5. You will get a new face detection scan, whenever the face detection algorithm has been improved.

I have been using the precaution to add the names of the people as keywords to each photo, see: How to use Keywords to Back Up the Named Faces in Photos and Improve the Search for People … - Apple Community

Open the album for each person in the People album, select all photos at once with ⌘A, then open the Info ⌘I and type the name of the person into the keywords line.
Repeat this for all named people.

Now you can easily find photos with missing or wrong faces tags with smart albums based on keywords, and it is much easier to fix missing people names, if some faces names should get lost after a system upgrade.

I kept my older two Macs running Mojave and upgraded only the newer Macs to Big Sur. It is great to have Mojave as well, where I can run the older 32-bit applications, particularly QuickTime Player 7 to convert older videos. I am still occasionally coming across videos in an older format, that will not play on Big Sur or Catalina and need converting. Many older videos are in older Keynote presentations.

With iCloud Photos it is easy to keep my Photos Library in sync across my Macs, even with different system versions on the Macs. It is working very well between Mojave and Big Sur, but I had a few syncing problems, when one of the Macs has been running Catalina and I had three different system versions on the Macs.

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Answer 2

Jadeviper Author

Level 1

53 points

Feb 12, 2021 8:58 AM in response to léonie

Hi Lonnie,

Thanks for your feedback. I suspected that each new major version of Photos would do a rescan of Faces. I just wish that Apple would not touch pictures in which identified faces that have names on them would be left alone.

All my pictures do have tags for the person(s) in the pictures, so I can create smart albums to check if the face doesn't match the tag, but still this is work I rather not have to do.

As for iCloud I have not used it yet. I know that there were issues in the past years with libraries that had nested folders. I might give it a try this year, just wish the upload speed was faster as I read that it takes a while to do even if you have a fast connection

Thanks for confirming that going from v4 to v6 directly doesn't cause problems

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Answer 3

léonie

Level 10

197,279 points

Feb 12, 2021 1:09 PM in response to Jadeviper

I did not have any problems when upgrading from Mojave to Big Sur, but our systems seem to be different, as I am using iCloud Photos on all devices and the named faces are synced between devices. Be sure to keep a backup of your Photos Library before upgrading.

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Answer 4

Jadeviper Author

Level 1

53 points

Feb 12, 2021 1:23 PM in response to léonie

Good point about your iCloud use. I definitely will make backups along the way. I will most likely keep a Mojave master, Catalina master, and when I upgrade one of the computers to Big Sur (maybe by v11.4?) I will keep a Big Sur master.

I have spent so much of my time tagging, location, and face identification over the years. To see something go wrong, either from a mistake by me, or Apple can be avoided with having backups of each major Photos update to help reduce any risk that a version of Photos messed something up

You are probably right that iCloud has matured enough to be a reliable option to consider

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Update Photos v4 to Photos v6, or update to Photos v5 first?

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