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I have a large number of photos of one person. In about half of them the person has been recognised and marked correctly by Apple Photo, but in the other half the face is marked as "unnamed".
Is there a way to assign the name of this person to all these photos in one go, rather than correcting them one by one?
MacBook Pro Big Sur 11.6.1
Thanks, E
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.5
Photos may have created two different People albums for the same person. If that should be the case, you can assign a name summarily by merging the two split albums.
When you find an unnamed face on a photo on your make, double-click the thumbnail of the face in the Details section below the photo. This will open the People album for this person. If there is is a command at the bottom "Add to People album" this album is still hidden. Click "Add to people album". Now you can merge it with the existing album of this person. If "Add to people album" is not available, assign a name, then merge the two albums in People. If you are lucky, you can add many faces at once this way.
Photos may have created two different People albums for the same person. If that should be the case, you can assign a name summarily by merging the two split albums.
When you find an unnamed face on a photo on your make, double-click the thumbnail of the face in the Details section below the photo. This will open the People album for this person. If there is is a command at the bottom "Add to People album" this album is still hidden. Click "Add to people album". Now you can merge it with the existing album of this person. If "Add to people album" is not available, assign a name, then merge the two albums in People. If you are lucky, you can add many faces at once this way.
In the Photos app, open the People panel from the Sidebar (near the very top). Double-click the person in question, then scroll all the way to the bottom. Click Confirm Additional Photos if the option is available. Photos will go through a series of photos it thinks look like the selected person. Note that responding “Yes” to a single photo will lead Photos to tag other, similar photos, without asking you about each one individually.
If Photos missed any untagged photos, coming back later after photoanalysisd has had enough time to further examine your library may yield additional matches.
Thanks. Have done that, but after several weeks there are still many untagged ones left.
I can see photoanalysisd, photolibraryd and cloudphotod in activity monitor.
When I manually name an unnamed person, photoanalysisd is briefly active, then goes back to 0%CPU.
When I quit Photos, photoanalysisd is briefly active, then goes to 0%CPU. I would expect it to continue scanning the library while there are unnamed photos?
How are photos on iPad, iPhone and in apple cloud analysed, and do these processes interfere with each other and with Mac photos? I think that photos named on iPad are subsequently unnamed again on my Mac.
Craig Federighi did an interview a few years ago on this topic. He explained that each device does analysis/face recognition locally, but that each tag is sent to iCloud and propagated to all other devices. I know I had many issues with face tags in the year after this feature was implemented, but hopefully they’ve been resolved by now.
Faces should analyze while Photos is in the background, and at times it can take a while. If you’ve left it for a day or so and there’s been no change, then I wouldn’t expect any more progress. You can always try tagging more faces to further train the ML algorithm, and hope that helps automatically detect more faces.
Thank you, Lohvarn, for your help and explanations. So, I'll be patient for a few days and let the apple algorithms do their thing and hope for the best. Have a nice weekend, E
Bingo! Thanks, Leonie, this does the trick. Good to know about multiple and hidden albums.
Btw, in Photos v. 6 "Add to People album" is now called "add this person to people".
How to assign a person to multiple photos where person is "unnamed
