Smart Album or other way to view unnamed faces?

That is essentially what I am doing:

I am using a smart album with the three rule (on macOS 26 Tahoe)

• The first rule (with the blank field for the name) is finding all photos with unnamed faces, but unfortunately including all photos with no faces in them all.
• The second rule is excluding all my landscape, wildlife photos etc, that I have tagged with the keyword "No_People"
• The second rule is excluding all photos with faces of strangers in them, that I want to ignore.

But there are still a few problematic cases, all photos with more than one face in them, a friend in the foreground, some strangers in the background. When I assign the keyword Strangers after naming the face of the person that needs to be named, it will never again appear in this smart album, even if the name is lost after a system upgrade, when Photos is scanning the faces again.

@Richard: I would love to have the feature back to tell photos, which detected faces I do not care about and should not be shown as unnamed. It would help a lot. I have sent feedback about this, several times since 2012, but no success so far.

I am keeping the faces circles frequently visible when working with the photos. It is the only place where I can see the name of a person. My main reason for tagging the faces with names is to be able to remember the names of the people I have met only once and where I will soon no longer remember their names when I see the photo again - distant family members that I met at family reunions only once, travel companions or people I met only occasionally at work, former students, etc. When I am seeing a group photo in Photos for Mac, it will need several clicks and round trips to the People&Pets album to see who's who in the picture, unless I write it into the caption or title, so I can see in the info "Left to right: Julian, Dick, Anne, George, Timothy". These captions help to name the faces again, when the face names vanish after an update, because the keywords with the names do not suffice to tell me the position in the photo. When I have circled all faces in a group photo I will usually take a screenshot of the named group and add it as an additional version of the photo. This way I can see the names also on my iPad and iPhone.

Apple seems to have designed the People&Pets album to create albums of people we know well and recognize them and know their name, when we see the photo. I am using the People&Pets album to look up the names of people I would not recognize again in the photo after a few years. so I have to keep precautions to save the assigned names reliably across system upgrades.

It seems to be intentional, that the option to search for all unnamed faces ist now missing. The first two versions of Photos included an album with all unnamed faces. But it has been removed, when macOS Sierra came out and the People album changed dramatically. In the first version of Photos we could remove or reject all detected faces that we did not want to name. That is now no longer possible. The Apple intelligence built into Photos want to keep each and every detected faces, all strangers in the background or crowds of people at a sporting event, a traffic scene, a concert etc., so it can recognignize the scenes. We cannot weed out the unnamed faces. There are roughly thirty thousand unnamed faces in my Photos Library. It would be like searching for a needle in a haystack to work with an album of all unnamed faces, unless we mark all photos with faces we do not want to name with a keyword linke "stranger".

Photos does not want us any longer to name each and every detected face, like it has been in iPhoto and Aperture. Since Sierra the suggested workflow is to add only a few people to People & Pets album, only for the People we are are frequently taking pictures of, and Photos will add automatically more photos to these People albums. And we can find the additional unnamed faces by using the command "Confirm additional faces".

My workflow is to keep the option "View > Show face names" enabled. This way I am seeing all unnamed faces circled, when I browse the new photos and view them enlarged . And then I name instantly the faces I want to name for the photos that I am not deleting .

léonie wrote: … It seems to be intentional,

They could, of course, let us mark "unnamed" faces to have their "unnamed" tags hidden.

In any case, unlike you, I almost always have face names hidden to avoid all those tags that seem to get in the way of other stuff I want to see.

I do, like you, add a keyword for everybody that I (or the computer) recognize in a picture. And I use the People & Pets Albums to help me find people I missed. And I rely more on Smart Albums to keep track of people than I use People etc albums.

So I have a Smart Album for Uncle Lonzo, maybe, and I'll go through there, especially after a major OS update, and see if any of Uncle Lonzo's unrecognized faces have become "unnamed" -- probably because face recognition has improved-- and I add the names. I've gotten to the point that I just don't deal much with tagging the untagged faces, mostly.

Another good reason to go through the faces every so often is to correct the wrong ones.

I agree. There's no way to find all photos that have no faces/names.

Tell Apple what missing features you'd like restored or new features added in Photos via Feedback - Photos - Apple

However, if there's a group picture and a couple have be identified don't know how Apple would be able to handle that scenario.

Poiks2 wrote: …I have three tags: No Faces, Ignore Faces, Unscanned Faces. T

I have an album called "Weird No Name." This has pictures that the Info Window shows a face clearly identified, but no name tag appears. I'm not sure if the face was recognized by Photos, or if I added it-- I think the only way to know is to examine the name tag circle, and I can't see that. However, some (maybe all) look like they must have been added manually.

I just looked, and a few of those have acquired name tags, but most are still identified in the info window, but without name tags.

Just another little puzzle…

I've used keywords NoPeople and so on, but I'm awful at going through to apply them. I have the keyword for Relatives, meaning distant cousins, I think, and Family, meaning closer family-- but I can't remember exactly where the demarcation between the two is. Is my sister-in-law's step daughter Family, or Relatives? (Family, I think.)

I wish Photos allowed comments with keywords so I could write down what my abbreviated keywords are really supposed to mean. What I really miss is the hierarchical keyword structure that iPhoto Library Manager provided.

While I'm wishing, I want comments on Folders.

I am still emulating the hierarchical keyword we had in Aperture by using underscores between the categories, for example the keyword Animal_Bird_Sparrow for the category "Animal", the subcategory "Bird" and the category "Sparrow". The search will find all parts of the keyword, but not smart albums. Since Big Sur there is a discrepancy between the use of keywords in the search and in smart albums: Keywords in Photos 6 on Big Sur - Discrep… - Apple Community

It is still working this way on Tahoe: I just searched for "Robin" and the keyword "Animal_Bird_Robin" was one of the search results:

It is an undocumented feature and keeps changing between system versions, so we cannot rely on it for long-term use. It would be much better, if Apple would support hierarchical keywords directly. But I am skeptical, as there is still nearly no support for keywords and smart albums on the iPhone and iPad.

I had forgotten about this clever hierarchy system that you had mentioned before. So much to do!

I am also seeing some faces with a missing circle, that are still appearing as named.

Perhaps they have been named on an earlier system version, but Photos could not detect the face again.