Photos detects the same face twice on one face (on a single picture) - how to fix?

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Photos detects the same face twice on one face (on a single picture) - how to fix?

I had to repair my Photos Library.photoslibrary (104 GB, 36.900 Photos, 260 videos) due to "green pictures and people". After finishing (several rounds of) repair, I found problems in the People/Face identification. The same face is tagged twice.

The are some of these cases which I can fix, because one of the two circles is a manually added face-circle that has the X to remove it. However, the majority of the cases has two Photos-generated face-circles. For these I have no idea how to fix it. Any suggestion how to get the fixed?

Quite some photos/pictures are affected, and I have no idea how to identify the photos that have this problem. Also, the problem is not easy to detect, because the circles and name tags fully overlap in almost all cases. But when one slowly types the start of a name, the problem gets visible.

Previous versions of Photos offered an option to "rescan faces" for a selected picture, but this option is seemingly gone now (I am using Version 5.0 (161.0.120) with Catalina (10.15.7 (19H524)), my iMac from late 2013 does not support a newer system.

Thanks in advance! BW

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Mar 7, 2021 3:16 AM

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bwadma Author

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164 points

Mar 23, 2021 1:43 PM in response to bwadma

What finally helped me was PowerPhotos (from Fat Cat Software). All photos and metadata except "people information" was transferred (or merged) into a new empty Photos library. During repeated transfer/merge with optimised settings (thanks to the great support from Fat Cat Software), two problems were detected in my data (these data accumulated over years, from the first versions of iPhoto): two first-frame thumbnails of videos had metadata that caused them to show up as real videos, and several "Burst photos" were messed up. The "video thumbnails" were deleted, and the Bursts were resolved by selecting a single photo (no Bursts remaining in the library).

There was an additional problem detected: if one has a picture that shows a person in a mirror, the people/face detection function (of Photos 5.0 / Catalina) runs into trouble. I guess that Photos face recognition relies on a one-to-one relation of photo to face/person in the database. But this relation is broken by a single photo that show the same person "real" and as picture in a mirror. My workaround was to make sure to leave one of the two faces "unnamed".

All people names needed to be assigned again, but it turned out that the "cleaned dataset" allowed better face recognition than before.

Thanks!!

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Photos detects the same face twice on one face (on a single picture) - how to fix?

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