Queries regarding unknown faces - smart album

It seems to be fruitless, to invest too much work into this, as the behavior of the smart album is changing with every system version. Apple removed the built-in album showing all unnamed faces with macOs 10.13 High Sierra, in favor of syncing the faces with iCloud. Before Photos 3 on High Sierra it made sense to find the unnamed faces and either name them or reject them (for artifacts, that are no face at all or strangers in the background, that we do not know or do not care about. In the newer system versions we cannot remove the faces we do not care about. Finding the faces we want to name would be searching for a needle in a haystack. Apple wants to keep each and every detected face around, probably they are needed for the artificial intelligence algorithms for screen recognition. Since High Sierra we are supposed to look only for unnamed faces of the people we have added to the People album. Once we have added people to People, the "Confirm additional Faces" dialog is supposed to present us all additional unnamed faces looking similar to this person.

I am now creating my own "All unnamed faces" album with the help of keywords. Instead of rejecting faces (what is no longer possible) I am tagging each photo that does not show a face I would want to name with the keywords "Strangers" or "No_People". This way I have to deal with photos without relevant faces only once.

A smart album with the rules

• Match all:
• Person is not (leave the name empty)
• Keyword is not Strangers
• Keyword is not No_People

will then show only photos with at least one unnamed face in macOs 12 Monterey.

I think that you have found what many of us have: There's no way to do what you want.

Send a Feature Request to Apple at Feedback - Photos - Apple

Maybe if enough of us do that, it'll show up some day...

If you name all strangers with the same name, you may mess up the face recognition. Photos might learn that the person Stranger is an average person, looking like everyone, and then assign all other people 's faces to Stranger. I would not risk it.

That why I am adding the keyword instead. It is quickly done with a single keyboard shortcut, when the Keyword manager is open.

Naming every blank "stranger" sure sounds like a lot of work! I think that there is little value in using the face ID at all. I've decided, I think, that what I want is to be able to find all the pictures with, say, MaryLou in them. So when Photos identifies MaryLou in new pictures that I upload, I select them all and give all those the keyword MaryLou. Any other pictures I find with MaryLou in them, I add the keyword without messing with the face circle. From then on I just search for the keyword. The only time I feel I need the face identified is in family reunion pictures with people I don't really recognize or that I know my granddaughter won't recognize, but she ought to know. For all the rest a keyword saying "here's a picture with MaryLou in it" seems good enough-- and way, way easier to do.

I need the smart album with all unnamed faces only after a system upgrade. After each major system upgrade many of the faces I named are reverting to "unnamed". Then the smart albums are helping a lot. to discover this quickly. Also, if the face recognition has been improved and is now detecting more faces as before.

I have started to do what you suggested. I've got a smart folder that excludes the people who show up most often, and I going through those, quite quickly, really, and adding the keyword NoPeopleIKnow, skipping the few that have folks who show up more rarely. Thanks for the suggestion! I haven't thought of why I should divide these into strangers and nobody.

By the way, what does "Person is not (leave the name empty)" do? I'm not sure I see the pattern...