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Nathan.To

Q: Yosemite Photo app Automatically Adding Faces

Hi all

 

Photo seems to be automatically adding faces for a given name when I use face recognition. Since it does not get that 100% right, I don't want that to happen. Does anyone know how to turn this off please?

 

I only want to have faces added for a given name that I specifically have reviewed and identified as actually being that person.

 

I can't even easily tell which faces Photo is automatically naming as a specific person, but I can see that some are wrong. When one has > 5K photos of a given person with carefully selected faces and names, to have Photo add additional faces that it thinks are that person is NOT a good thing. I can't imagine why anyone would imagine that it would be, especially as one can't even see which faces Photo has automatically selected, so one cannot even check what Photo is doing.

 

Many thanks

 

Nathan

MacPro, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on May 11, 2015 1:09 AM

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Q: Yosemite Photo app Automatically Adding Faces

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  • Helpful answers

  • by R C-R,

    R C-R R C-R May 11, 2015 2:55 AM in response to Nathan.To
    Level 6 (17,633 points)
    May 11, 2015 2:55 AM in response to Nathan.To

    FWIW, I have not seen any indication that Photos is automatically adding any new recognized faces to any photos without first asking for user confirmation. I did have some mis-identified ones when I first opened Photos & the migration from my iPhoto library occurred, but after checking the same photos in iPhoto, they were all mis-identified in it as well, so clearly that wasn't something Photos did.

  • by Nathan.To,

    Nathan.To Nathan.To May 11, 2015 3:09 AM in response to R C-R
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 11, 2015 3:09 AM in response to R C-R

    Thanks for getting back on this.

     

    I am under the impression that Photo adds names for faces automatically as it says that it is, e.g. "N faces added manually, NN faces added automatically".

     

    The message may not be exact, but I am loathe to experiment again to get the exact message.

     

    After it does that, I do see the wrong names on some faces. It may well be the case that those names were misapplied in iPhoto before, but I have always been very careful not to do that, so I don't think they were. It would be good if it were easy to tell when a face was named, so I could be certain, but I think I am anyway.

     

    Regards

     

    Nathan

  • by R C-R,Helpful

    R C-R R C-R May 11, 2015 7:51 AM in response to Nathan.To
    Level 6 (17,633 points)
    May 11, 2015 7:51 AM in response to Nathan.To

    I have seen that message too, after I type in a name for a suggested face. However, while the meaning of the N & NN numbers are not very clear to me, they appear only after I have been given a chance to confirm that the faces in the (often too tiny) thumbnails are those of the named person. There seem to be two slightly different confirmation displays. One asks if the thumbnails are of the person & none of those thumbnails have the blue confirmation markers pre-selecteded. The other has all the markers pre-selected on the thumbnails & asks me if any of them are not of that person. This seems to have something to do with the N & NN counts, but I have not worked out exactly what.

     

    But I just discovered something that might accomplish what you want, although it does not turn off anything: A suggested face from the list at the bottom of the window can be selected & dragged & dropped onto a named face in the upper part of the window. That adds just that one face shot, with out suggesting any others, & avoids the need to type or confirm anything.

  • by Nathan.To,

    Nathan.To Nathan.To Mar 4, 2016 12:51 AM in response to Nathan.To
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Mar 4, 2016 12:51 AM in response to Nathan.To

    I have been experimenting emperically.

     

    I started off with 6090 photos of a person.

     

    I manually selected five photos and added those.

     

    Photos reported that five photos were added by me, and one automatically.

     

    I then confirmed that there were now 6096 photos for that person. So, a photo was added, automatically, not by me, and I have no idea which photo that was or whether it was correctly identified.

     

    This is so wrong.

     

    Nathan

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Mar 4, 2016 1:05 AM in response to Nathan.To
    Level 10 (105,761 points)
    iLife
    Mar 4, 2016 1:05 AM in response to Nathan.To

    When I saw this message, I have been concerned too. But I never found an automatically added face of a person, other than on exact duplicates of the named photos.

     

    Have checked for duplicates ?

     

    ANother occasion, where automatic naming happened, was after  I named a photo on one computer. The faces tags synced with iCloud Photo like Barry, but not the thumbnails.  and some thumbnails have been filled with names automatically, after I started to name other faces on that photo.

  • by Nathan.To,

    Nathan.To Nathan.To Mar 4, 2016 1:49 AM in response to léonie
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Mar 4, 2016 1:49 AM in response to léonie

    Hi

     

    Many thanks for replying. It could well be that the message refers to duplicate photos, but I just can't tell. You can appreciate that, with many tens of thousands of photos and well over a hundred faces that I am tracking, it would be very hard to spot what Photos is doing automatically unless it is made very visible.

     

    I opened a case about this last October, and have just been on the phone again to Apple support again to see if the engineering team have been able to communicate anything useful about that case, but it seems there has been no progress in the last six months, except that I need to do more data capture. I have spoken to two senior support staff, and neither seemed to understand this feature works at all, or even very much about Photos.

     

    Regards

     

    Nathan

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Mar 4, 2016 2:09 AM in response to Nathan.To
    Level 10 (105,761 points)
    iLife
    Mar 4, 2016 2:09 AM in response to Nathan.To

    Whenever I am seeing an "Added automatically", I open the album for that face in question to check, what has been added. So far, it has been correct.

     

    It would help tremendously, if Photos would keep an album of automatically added faces, so we can double check more easily.

     

    I have spoken to two senior support staff, and neither seemed to understand this feature works at all, or even very much about Photos.

    That explains, why there is no decent documentation about this feature. It must be work in progress.

     

    You are still on Yosemite, right?  The upgrade to Photos in El Capitan made the Faces album more convenient.  It is a lot easier to delete unwanted face from the faces strip below the faces album.  We can now sort the faces thumbnails automatically on the board.

    If you are using Faces and Places a lot, the update to El Capitan will improve things.

  • by Nathan.To,

    Nathan.To Nathan.To Mar 4, 2016 2:10 AM in response to léonie
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Mar 4, 2016 2:10 AM in response to léonie

    Hi

     

    Thanks again. I do try and check, but with 6000+ photos for one face alone, I can't be sure that I will be able to catch any mistakes. Which is one of the reasons I have to be *very* careful about what I add.

     

    Also Photos does random things anyway, and photos can turn up with a person's name for a face for other reasons which are also unexplicable, so even when I see a wrong face assignment, I can't tell whether that just happened, or whether it happened at some time in the last.

     

    Regards

     

    Nathan