How do I move and enlarge the circle when naming a pet in a photo?

MillerFamily2025 wrote: …I am trying to name a pet. When I click to add a name, it places a small circle on my cat's back. How do I move that circle to my cat's face? And enlarge the circle, as it is quite small.

When you click on the little circle in the Info Window, you get a circle about the size of the average face located in the middle of the picture which, as you say, probably isn't where the face is. So you click in the center of the circle and drag it where you'd like.

Sometimes this goes awry, and you find yourself grabbing the whole picture instead of the circle. Photos lost "focus" on what you meant to click, and it thinks you're still in the Info Window, maybe. If that happens, I usually just click somewhere in the picture to tell Photos that's where I mean to be working, and then I can move it. Another plan is to click in the "Click to Name" field and type the name in first, and then you can move the circle.

The size of the circle is changed with the little knob on the side of the circle

to expand or retract the perimeter, with the center staying put. If you haven't already, you can type the name in then.

The size of the circle and the location of the center don't really matter-- you can arrange it however you like so the name ends up in a convenient place. Photos does not take manual IDs in consideration when identifying new faces.

So putting her name on her nose, for instance,

Still looks OK, since the circle isn't shown when viewing the image.

That is a known bug, this problem has been around since Photos 5 on macOS 10.15 Catalina. Sometimes the focus will get lost, and then we can no longer move the circle. I hope, it will been fixed some day. Apple has to fix it, there is nothing you can do.

For the time being there is no other help than to use the work-arounds mentioned by Richard. In short:

• When that happens, try to click first outside the circle to bring the focus back to the photo, then try again to adjust the faces circle.
• You can also enter the name of the person or the pet with the circle in the wrong location. Afterwards we can usually move it to the right place.
• If all fails, restart Photos. Sometimes we even have to restart the Mac.

See this user tip: Work-Around: What to do, when the Faces Circle is jumping around - Apple Community

As a precaution to avoid the loss of the focus: Avoid running other apps in the background, that might hog the memory.

What léonie and I have said, plus:

Sometimes, you need to close Photos and re-open it. Next is to re-start the Mac.

Next is to re-start in Safe Mode, see if it works, and then restart normally. Safe Mode bypasses certain potentially disruptive processes, and it often helps. Safe Mode is different for different computers, so see this: 

           Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support 

Surely one of these will work. But as léonie said, it will probably happen again. For a while for me, it seemed pretty often, but not so much recently.

Let us know…