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Iphoto 11 -How to turn off faces?

Hello,

is there a way to disable the ***ing "face detection" function ?

It creates thousands of separate thumbnails, many of them do not even show faces, and same people are shown as different ones, so having more than 5.000 faces in my library (which is definitely not the case). This function only takes up space, steals cpu power and is useless for me. I have about 17.000 Pictures in iphoto, andi think it makes the database handling even more instable by creating multiple "faces" thumbnails and redirecting them to the corresponding file.


Thanks for an answer... (What do you think - Better move to LR?)


Michael

Macbook Pro, none

Posted on Jan 19, 2013 1:04 AM

Reply
84 replies

Feb 16, 2015 11:06 AM in response to J.0

Is there a simple way to just turn off Faces entirely? My main problem with it is that it is a very un-Apple like product. Apple is all about making things easy for users, for giving them the maximum control over their devices. Faces is automatic. Faces is always on. Faces can't be turned off. It sounds more like a Microsoft product than an Apple product. I don't like it and don't want it on my machine. I didn't ask for it. It creates Faces of people I don't even know. At this point I have 18,000+ Faces in my iPhoto library and I don't want any of them.


Can anyone help?

Feb 17, 2015 11:25 AM in response to Yer_Man

Terence,


If you know the answer, it would be helpful if you could post it again.


In any case, the command: defaults write com.apple.iPhoto PKFaceDetectionEnabled 0


doesn't seem to help in that 'unnamed' always shows up under people's faces whenever info (apple-I) is selected, even if faces was previously turned off.


Note this sequence

- bring up iPhoto and display a picture

- select Info (apple-I) and note that faces now show up with 'unnamed' under them

- unclick the faces option on the right hand side, and not that the 'unnamed' tag is now gone.

- unselect Info (apple-I), and note that 'unnamed' is still gone

- exit iPhoto


- start iPhoto again, display a picture, select Info, and not that 'unnamed' shows up again, even though faces was set 'off ' previously.


As far as I can tell, this is the same behavior whether the defaults option above is set to "0" or "1"

Iphoto 11 -How to turn off faces?

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