Where is Photos for Mac plist stored?

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Level 1

44 points

Where is Photos for Mac plist stored?

I have a client with 350,000+ photos. This worked very well under Aperture but Photos for Mac is extremely slow and his Photos Library has become much larger than the previous iPhoto Library. We suspect it is the Face Recogniton routine, I see 64GB of thumbnails (faces) in the Model Resources directory. I used to address this in iPhoto by disabling FaceDectectionEnabled record in the com.apple.iPhoto plist via the write command in the Terminal. I cannot find any plist for Photos, other than com.apple.Photos.LSSharedFileList.plist, which only has Recent Items data, no settings. Anyone know where is Property List file is?

Posted on May 13, 2015 9:03 AM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

200,519 points

May 13, 2015 9:15 AM in response to James Knight

CChanging the .plist file worked in iPhoto, because Aperture and iPhoto are using the same libraries. And iphoto needed to respect the face detection settings in Aperture. But Photos libraries are not shared with Aperture, so I doubt it will work with Photos.

photos's Preferences files are in the user library in the folder Containers, deeply nested in the folder com.apple.photos or similar. sorry, Icannot check the exact name on my iPad.

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Answer 2

Niel

Community+ 2025

Level 10

741,155 points

May 13, 2015 9:17 AM in response to James Knight

The exact location is ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Photos/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Photos .plist.

(127355)

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Answer 3

May 13, 2015 9:20 AM in response to James Knight

Those files will be located in the Containers folder. However, I'm not sure it's a good idea to mess with the files there. If you can figure out which is the right one, do so at your own risk.

If you don't want to use Faces, delete all the faces within the album. If that is actually where the files are stored and deleting reduces the file size, lock that folder so it can't be modified. I don't know if that will cause error though.

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Answer 4

James Knight Author

Level 1

44 points

May 13, 2015 9:59 AM in response to Glenn Leblanc

There is a faces.autoVIPs boolean record set to True, but I am not certain this is the record, so I am not changing it. There are no other records with FaceDetectionEnabled like in the iPhoto plist, as I suspected.

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Answer 5

léonie

Level 10

200,519 points

May 13, 2015 9:20 AM in response to Niel

Thanks, Niel! 🙂

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Answer 6

James Knight Author

Level 1

44 points

May 13, 2015 9:33 AM in response to Niel

Thanks, Niel! i will take a look with my xCode property list editor, but I suspect the record will have a different name other than FaceDetectionEnabled.

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Answer 7

perajc

Level 1

0 points

Feb 15, 2016 5:54 PM in response to James Knight

Hi James,

Were you able to disable Face Recognition? I can't find the faces.autoVIPs boolean record, any help would be appreciated. I have same problem as your client.

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