managing people in photos
I have added names to many of my photos, but now seem to have more than one and sometimes several groups of photos under the same name. How can I merge these sets of named photos?
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
As Keith mentioned, I find it the easiest way to merge people into one is by dragging the thumbnail of the album for a person onto the person I want to merge it with. We can drag several selected people together. We just have to be careful not to drop them accidentally onto the thumbnail of a different person, if we have to drag a very long distance. If there are hundreds of different people albums between the two people I want to combine, I make the people to be combined temporarily a Favorite. This will add them to the bottom of the Favourites section, close together, so I can easily merge them by dragging. Then I remove them again from the Favourites.
It is a lot of work to split an album again, if two people got merged buy Photos. If we discover a people album with the faces of two or more people combined, it may not work to rename them with the name we used before. Photos seems to remember that these two people are the same person and will merge them again. I am separating them first by assigning completely new nicknames for each merged person. This seems to prevent Photos from merging them again. See: How to Correct Merged People Albums - Apple Community
on your Mac, click People in the sidebar.