macOS Photos: Captions disappear, People issues

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Level 1

8 points

macOS Photos: Captions disappear, People issues

I am using MacOS Tahoe 26.3 on my M4 Mac Mini with 64 TB of unified memory. My library has about 25,000 photos plus a couple hundred videos . I have had strange things happening in Photos. I depend on Photos.

Captions disappear. I get the message "Looking for captions". It doesn't find them. Sometimes (not today), as I type in the captions it's like Photos is actively backspacing against me like it doesn't want captions.
Certain people in my People and Pets are "forgotten". They are present in People Pets view but when I identify someone in a picture as one of those people who are "forgotten" their name doesn't come up. Instead Photos creates a new person with that name. YES, I'm sure I'm spelling their name the same way every time. I end up merging those two people (with the same name) but I have to do it again and again.

I was having this problem a few weeks ago so I rebuilt the Photos library. Photos forgot the names of many people whose names I put in so I had to put them in again. Try that with a few thousand photos! You can imagine my reluctance to try that again. I thought I could put their names into the captions to make it easier if it happened again. Now my captions are not found! Since rebuilding, I have found people who appear to have had their names that had been entered by me, restored by the system incorrectly. It would be nice to turn that off.

YES, I've Quit and restarted Photos. YES, I've re-started the computer. NO, I don't Optimize my storage. NO, I don't share my pictures across devices using iCloud. My Home folder is on an external volume. On my boot drive, 97.03 GB out of 994.66 GB used; on my external data drive, 874.65 GB of 4.1 TB used. All my drives are formatted as APFS.

I wish there was a way to organize people into categories, for example "close family", "distant family ", "school friends", "neighbours", "work colleagues", and so on. As it is now, I have to drag a person in the People and Pets View to where they should be. Besides being slow, it's buggy when I try to drag several people at once.

I can't be the only one this is happening to. It is very, very frustrating.

Mac mini, macOS 26.3

Posted on Feb 16, 2026 3:17 PM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

202,305 points

Feb 18, 2026 12:11 AM in response to Brownest

When it looks like Photos has forgotten recent edits, Photos may have opened a different library, for example a backup copy of your library. You can check, which library is currently open in the Photos > Settings > General > Library Location.

Photos may switch to a different library for several reasons. For example, if the external volume with the library has not yet been mounted, when the system background processes want to access the system Photos Library. How is your external drive with the library connected to your Mac? Does it have a wired connection or is it a network volume?

The APFS format alone does not suffice to make an external drive compatible with Photos.

The drive needs to be mounted locally with a wired connection and must not be a network volume.
The volume with the system library needs to be connected, whenever you are logged into your user account, even if you are currently not working with Photos.
The volume with the library must not have been use for Time Machine backups or have any other backup software installed.
As a test, try to set the "Ignore ownership on this volume" flag as described here: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

Another possible reason for vanishing faces and other metadata could be a damage done by cleaning apps. Have you been running third-party software to remove duplicates? Some of them are cleaning very aggressively and can damage a photos library beyond repair.

In that case you would have to restore the library from the last backup you made before the cleaning attempt.

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Answer 2

Feb 17, 2026 8:00 AM in response to Brownest

Captions don't disappear for me. In addition to captions I use keywords which are especially robust. I have keywords for Family, Cousins, WorkPeople, etc. Then I use Smart Albums to hold those groups. If you're not using keywords and Smart Albums, then you're missing one of the great powers of Photos. See this:

Organizing Photos with Folders & Albums - Apple Community

This talks more about keywords, though for a different purpose:

Choosing Favorites using Keywords in Mac … - Apple Community

Adding name tags manually puts people into their Person Album along with the Photos-recognized pictures. But manually added names won't help in future IDs-- it isn't used to update the ID characteristics of that person.

Re-building the Library database probably won't help in recognition.

You should see this:

Saving Face Names for Genealogy - Apple Community

It discusses advantages of captions and keywords.

Let us know how it goes…

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macOS Photos: Captions disappear, People issues

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