facial recognition

Hello millstonemom,

Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.

We understand you wanting to know if facial recognition still works in the Photos app. The short answer to your question is that yes, it still works. You can take a look at this support article to set up and use Face Recognition:

Set up and use Face Recognition - Apple Support

If you have more specific questions about using Face Recognition, get back to us and we can see where we can go from there.

Best regards.

Photos is scanning for faces, while you are not using the application. And the procedure to name the detected faces is very different from the way it used to be in iPhoto.

In iPhoto, we were presented a long list of detected faces and could name them or reject them as "Not a face". The Photos .app is not showing a list of all unnamed faces. It is scanning all photos, collecting a list of detected faces, trying to recognise identical faces and grouping them by people. Then it will add just a few people to the People album, only some of the people that have been recognised in many photos as the same person. The threshold seems to be at least recognised as the same person in fifteen photos or more. If we want to see more people in the People album, we have to add them manually. Find a photo of this person with a clearly recognised face, then name the face to add this person to the People album. And there is no way any longer to reject faces we do not want to name. Photos will always keep all detected faces around. Since we cannot weed them out, all we can do is being frugal with adding people to the People album.

To get started, I would ensure, that Photos is showing circles around the faces for all detected faces. This is enabled in the "View" menu. Go to "View", then set the checkmark for "Show Faces Names". Now you can see circles around all detected faces. Type the name of your dad into the name fields below the faces circles, for some more photos.

Then open your dad's people album. You may be seeing an alert "Confirm additional faces". If this alert is not shown, scroll down to the bottom of the album and look for a command "Confirm additional faces".

Photos may already have recognised many more faces, but does not show them, until you confirm them. Before you name faces manually, try to confirm all already recognised faces waiting for you.

Why are you asking? Is it not working for you as expected? Are you asking about the face recognition on an iPhone, iPad, or on a Mac? It is not quite clear, because you seem to have been reading "Use the People album in Photos on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch", but are asking in the Photos for Mac forum.

The face recognition procedure has been changed a lot since the first version of photos, so it would help to know the system version you are having installed on your device.