Identified people, but no face circle, so can't be changed or removed

No. But I did uncover more weird issues around it.

• If you go to the people album and right click on the photo and select "person is not in this photo", nothing will happen at all.
• BUT, if you select every photo under that person and select "person is not in these photos", you will get a weird result. All the photos will be removed from the album except for the ghost people.
• BUT, if you go back to the people page that person will now be gone. And if you go to one of the photos the ghost person will now be gone. Hurray, you have removed the ghost people. You can then start the normal process of naming the person and rebuilding the album.
• BUT, you will get a whole different batch of ghost photos. I've done this on two macs with two different sets of photos. Very frustrating.

So I've given up until the next update.

I did speak to Applecare and they took some diagnostics and a screen recording of the issue. So fingers crossed.

Sorry, when I said I understood how the confirmation of faces worked I meant, yes, I have confirmed all the faces and hadn't seen anything odd. Both when I open up a face and it asks if I want to review photos and by going to the bottom and selecting 'Confirm additional photos'.

There were no hidden albums to add back as I don't use them. But yes, I did check.

I only added added tentative faces when it looked like Photos had been unable to detect them. I stopped when I realised that the faces had been detected, they just weren't displaying a circle. If I go to the person album and select 'person is not in this photo' it will convert my tentative circle to unnamed, but the ghost remains and the photo stays in the person album.

Yes, face circles can appear on the photo for other people beside the ghost. For example, 3 people in the photo, 2 people with detected face circles but 1 with none. Scroll down to the details section and all 3 people will be listed. Clicking on any of them will take you to the respective album for that person. The problem is, you can only rename the 2 with circles. The other one is a ghost and can't be renamed or removed. But you can search on it, and it appears in the person album, (but it ignores any attempt to say 'person is not in photo'. Also, the ghost person will appear in other photos just fine, so it isn't them in particular.

No I haven't merged any people. But I've recreated the problem on a different mac that I refreshed just for working this out. I imported 500 family photos, (I removed all metadata first), let it detect faces, named a handful, (also did confirmation), and noticed that ghosts were randomly appearing. I'm hoping this test will help clear any chance of user error or corruption with my original library on my macbook.

I thought it might be from the update.

I had been putting my own tags over the top of the ghost people. But my main issue is when it incorrectly adds the wrong person as a ghost.

As I mentioned, I can't remove these ghosts at all. Untagging them in the Person album doesn't remove them for me. The person is still attached through the details section even after using 'person is not in this photo'.

If I manually tag a person who is also silently tagged and then use 'Person is not in this photo', it will unname my manual tag. But it still leaves the ghost person in the details list. That's when I realised I might be dealing with a bug of some kind.

It really messes up my smart albums when it surfaces people that aren't in the photo but won't let me manually untag or correct them.

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately I've mostly tried both of those.

For the first one it seems to be completely random per photo. I've got bunch of photos from an event with the same people appearing across multiple photos. The same person will appear normally in some photos, (name & circle, can be changed etc), and in other photos the same person will only appear in the details section, (no name or circle, can't be changed). And it isn't the same person having issues. As far as I can tell, any person who appears in the Peoples album can be a ghost for some photos.

For the second, I was only adding faces when I initially thought they had been missed. I stopped when I realised something was up after noticing the missing faces were listed in the details section and couldn't be modified. I am familiar with process for confirming additional faces and haven't seen anything odd pop up around this.

I'd like to try a few more options before hitting the nuclear face reset. My photos go back to 2000 and it would be so tedious to do it all again. It took months the first time I did it and I still complain about it.

But also I'm not sure it would work. I took 500 random family jpegs with no metadata and took them to my old iMac. I clean installed Monterey onto it, set up a clean system library that was not connected to icloud and imported the photos.

After it had started to detect faces I started naming them and after a short period of time I noticed that the same issue was happening.

I'm going to play around on the old iMac with those 500 photos and see if I can find a solution or workaround. But I'll probably hold off on doing anything major to my main system until after a few patches, just in case that fixes it easilly. I really don't want to retag everyone, my partner wouldn't be able to take the complaining.

I'll keep an eye out for them, but I haven't noticed any so far. Certainly none of the important people in my albums are missing.

I'm reasonably sure I'm not getting any merged people. I've gone through the 500 photos on my test machine and verified all the people it found have been named. I've then verified the count in the people album. I've not found any missing/merged people, but I have verified a whole lot of photos with detected people with no circles or names. So I'm leaning towards bug? Or I'm just really unlucky on two machines :(