Is there any way to tell Photos "this is not a face"?

I've scanned a ton of old photos. To help ID people I created a Smart Album where

Person/Pet Is

and an empty field, so I can find people whose faces aren't yet identified. Problem is, Photos (currently Sonoma/v. 9) has labeled things like dolls or statues or paintings as faces/people and given them unnamed tags. I wish I could have Photos not label them.

Further, there are people I'll never be able to ID--people from photos that are 100 years old, strangers who happen to be in the background, etc. Is there any way to stop particular Photos from identifying something as a face?

Posted on Jan 15, 2025 4:35 PM

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Posted on Jan 16, 2025 1:05 AM

There is no way to reject the faces of strangers, statues, artwork, etc in any version of Photos since macOS 10.13 High Sierra. The earlier versions of Photos allowed us reject the false positives, but the more recent versions of Photos are keeping each and every detected face, even in crowds of people, because Photos needs them for the Artificial Intelligence to recognize the scene, if the photo is showing a concert or a sporting event or similar. At the time Apple removed the "All Faces" album, because we can no longer weed it out and searching unnamed faces there would be looking for a needle in a haystack.


When I am coming across a photo with faces I do not want or need to name, or photos with no people in them at all, I am tagging them with the keyword "Strangers", or "No_people", or "Artwork".

Then I add keyword rules to my smart album to suppress the false positives, as shown in this screenshot and combine the rules with "match All".



By the way, I am also naming the faces in paintings or of statues, when I want to remember who the person is. I am using the People and Pets album to add named tags to all kinds of things in a photo, where I need to add a marker that can be removed, to tag a constellation or a comet in a photo of the starry sky, or mark a part of a rock that looks like face. The faces circles are very convenient to add removable markers to a photo without spoiling the photo.


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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 16, 2025 1:05 AM in response to Scott_R

There is no way to reject the faces of strangers, statues, artwork, etc in any version of Photos since macOS 10.13 High Sierra. The earlier versions of Photos allowed us reject the false positives, but the more recent versions of Photos are keeping each and every detected face, even in crowds of people, because Photos needs them for the Artificial Intelligence to recognize the scene, if the photo is showing a concert or a sporting event or similar. At the time Apple removed the "All Faces" album, because we can no longer weed it out and searching unnamed faces there would be looking for a needle in a haystack.


When I am coming across a photo with faces I do not want or need to name, or photos with no people in them at all, I am tagging them with the keyword "Strangers", or "No_people", or "Artwork".

Then I add keyword rules to my smart album to suppress the false positives, as shown in this screenshot and combine the rules with "match All".



By the way, I am also naming the faces in paintings or of statues, when I want to remember who the person is. I am using the People and Pets album to add named tags to all kinds of things in a photo, where I need to add a marker that can be removed, to tag a constellation or a comet in a photo of the starry sky, or mark a part of a rock that looks like face. The faces circles are very convenient to add removable markers to a photo without spoiling the photo.


Jan 15, 2025 11:12 PM in response to Scott_R

I just ignore empty (or wrong random "rare" faces). Besides, AFAIK the faces are rather fragile so the next macOS upgrade might very well clear them and start over. So if you have done a lot of work for them, some advocate copying the face info to the Keywords for a safer storage. And remember also regular backups. FWIW I edit all metadata outside Photos before importing and I have used GraphicConverter to add names to the IPTC/XMP Keywords, and the same for descriptions, dates, GPS.

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Is there any way to tell Photos "this is not a face"?

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