Manually tagged faces gone

If you restore your library from a backup it might fix the other reason as well.

If not, you will at least have the opportunity to tag all photos with named faces with a keyword (the names of the people in the photo) before you try to reair again.. The keywords will make it easier to find quickly the photos where named faces have been lost after a repair. In the long run it is safer anyway to have the face named separately embedded in the photos. For my library most of the manually added face names keep vanishing after each system upgrade. Or if Photos crashes and the system decides a Library repair is necessary on its own.

When you look in the People view, do you see those faces, anyway. Sometimes the visible tag is missing, but they are still identified. And, as Omar_A1 said, it may take time for everything to match up.

Manually adding little circles with names continues to be a bit problematic. Most of us include keywords with pictures that have names so, if we tagged Aunt Bertha, and it goes away for some reason, we can use a Smart Folder to gather all the Aunt Berthas together and, maybe, re-tag some. The little circles don't transfer outside of Photos, but keywords do.

In fact, I only insert manual circles when there is a reason to-- like a family reunion where keywords alone couldn't tell which one of those 17 people is Aunt Bertha. I will also put the names in order in the caption, but that's sometimes hard to figure out what order was used.

LordPathogen wrote: all the others photos for that child would also have to have keywords if I wanted to have that view of beginning to now.

Right. So you use the People view to gather all the pictures that are tagged Aunt Bertha (or use a smart album with "Person" "is" "Aunt Bertha"), select all, and add "AuntBertha" as a keyword-- since you do them all at once, this takes little time. As you find or acquire other pictures of Aunt Bertha you can add a little circle tag and also a keyword. (As I said earlier, I usually don't bother with the little circle unless Aunt Bertha is in a group picture and I might confuse her with Aunt Buella.)

So I have some faces that have keywords but don't have little circles, and they won't appear in the People view. So if I want to see pictures of Aunt Bertha, I use a smart album instead of the People view. The face tags are useful to me only for helping to apply keywords and for keeping people straight in group pictures. I rely on keywords because they are stable and are handy with exported pictures.

Hello LordPathogen,

Thank you for reaching out to Apple Support Communities.

It may take some time for your photos to fully index after repairing.

If you are having issues, these steps should help:

"Manually identify and name people in a photo

Some photos may contain people who are not automatically named. You can name them manually.

1. In the Photos app  on your Mac, double-click a photo to open it.
2. Do one of the following:

• Choose View > Show Face Names. Click the name (or click “unnamed”) under a face, type a name, then press Return (or choose a name that appears as you type).
• Click the Info button  in the toolbar. Click the Add button , drag the circle to position it over the face if necessary, click the Name field, type a name, then press Return.

You can click the Add button multiple times to identify multiple faces in a photo. To remove a name that you added to a face, click the Remove button on the person.

To stop showing face names in photos, choose View > Hide Face Names."

More details can be found here: Find and identify photos of people in Photos on Mac

If the issue persists, can you provide a few more details? Why was your photo library repaired? Also, what is your exact macOS version?

Cheers!

This is exactly why Apple is recommending to make a backup of your Photos Library before you repair it. Repairing a library is not a routine fix - if a library is badly damaged, trying to repair it can damage it further.

If the manually tagged faces do not reappear after a while, restore the previous version of your library from your backup. Then you can look up the missing faces

Hey LordPathogen,

At this point, we would recommend reaching out to Apple Support. They will have the necessary tools to investigate into this matter more with you: Get Support.

Take care.