remove wrong names from faces dropdown in photos app

This is unlikely to be of help to everyone but if you have a Time Machine backup of your library, you can restore it and effectively 'reset' the dropdown in that way. Photos will explain that it needs to repair the library when you launch it for the first time but once this is complete, the dropdown will be back to the way it was before the mistake.

I got it working!

So i tried the tip with the sqlitebrowser.app that a user wrote before.

- Download the app, it's freeware. You will find it with google

- Make sure the Photos app is closed!

- Go to your Photo Library file and "show package contents"

- Make a backup copy of person.db on any place in the System

- Open the file with sqlitebrowser.app and click on "Search Data" (the second tab from left)

- Choose "RKPerson" from the dropdown

- Search in the list for the wrong name

- Click on the number shown on the left of the line to highlight it

- Hit the delete Key on your Keyboard (not Backspace). If you're on a MacBook, hit fn+Backspace

- There will be around 3 warnings for every item you delete that way, just press ok and ignore them

- The line will still exist but it will be blank now!

- This is pretty much it. You can now open Photos and it shouldn't display the Name anymore

If anything goes wrong, simply replace the backupped db file!

Please mark this as solved, so the answer stay on top and not page 2 🙂

And please Apple FIX THIS!

Cheers

I highly recommend against restoring from a TimeMachine Backup. You could lose photos. If you roll back to a backup before some (or many) photos were imported, and if you deleted them from the source - iPhone, DSLR, etc - you'll never get them back, unless you then restore from a later backup, which will bring back the 'unused name'.

Let's just report to Apple and cross our fingers.

<Edited by Host>

A good idea, but repairing a library has a severe draw-back, if it is an iCloud Photo Library. afetr each repair the complete library will upload again to iCloud. With a large library I would rather live with a few wrong name suggestion than having to upload the complete library again.

I typed in a name in lower case. It is impossible to fix. The lower case name is always substituted for the name with upper case first letters even after deleting the face from the cork board. I guess someone at Apple thought that this feature was helpful.

even after deleting the face from the cork board.

Are you using iPhoto? Photos does not have a cork board, just a Faces album with Faces tiles. But in iPhoto you hcan correct lower-case errors just like in Photos. First type in a different name, for example xxx:Anna, then remove the prefix "xxx:" and the corrected case will stay.

I am using Photos. Sorry for the incorrect terminology, I used Faces under Albums. I tried your suggestion and it accepts the capitalized name but changes it to the lower case version.

Which version of Photos are you using?

You have to be persistent. When Photos replaces "helpfully" the name by the lower case version, add one more letter to make the suggested faces name go away, then correct the first letter to upper case, then delete the last letter you added.

I am using Photos Version 1.5 (370.42.0), OS X 10.11.6. I now have "First Last xxx", "First Lastx" and "first last". I can delete "First Last xxx", "First Lastx" and "first last" in the faces album, but all three versions persist in the pull down menu. When enter "First Last" it converts it to "first last". When I remove the x or the xxx it converts to the lower case version.

You guys do realize that i posted a working solution, right? Right??

Yes. Thanks. It is impressive work. It is on my list of projects. I was hoping for something that takes less than 5 minutes and would therefore fall into the GTD do immediately category.

Simple solution guys - well, it worked for me... - I tried most of the suggestions without success then had a thought :- Create the correct name as a contact [or edit the existing contact until it reads as you want it to - then it will show in the drop down when you try to re-name.

Nah, forget that, it seemed to work but the next time I opened photo, it had reverted...

I have the same problem as all of you. I tried to delete unused/false faces from the photos.db (after Sierra install), same table as in your post and same error. This problem is annoying me since approximately El Capitan release (at least).

Another suggestion based on ZeoS's post and timo.schaffner's post:

Rather than attempting to delete the record from the RKPerson table, rename the name of it to something that you'd never start typing for a name, for example, ...IGNOREME...

This way you don't risk corrupting the other tables that might relate to this record. For instance, as ZeoS pointed out, there's a trigger on that table for deleting records that doesn't execute correctly using the sqlite commandline tool or through the

sqlitebrowser.app

You may also find that you can't modify the Person.db because it's "locked."

To fix the first part, stop all background processes that have to do with Photos.app. Closing the app might not be enough. There's a photolibraryd process, and a cloudphotosd process, for example, that seem to have to do with this application, and they seem to stay running regardless of Photos.app being open or not.

In the Terminal.app, you can use something like the following to stop all processes with the word photo in them (warning! this may include other applications that have nothing to do with the photos app):

ps aux | grep -i 'photo' | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -HUP

Then, once you locate your Person.db file (the default is in ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/Database/apdb), you can either use that sqlitebrowser.app to modify the record, or you can use the installed sqlite3 terminal command like so (don't do this unless you're reasonably comfortable working in the terminal - getting this wrong could really mess up your face names):

sqlite3 Person.db

sqlite> UPDATE RKPerson SET name="...IGNOREME..." WHERE name="The misspelled name";

sqlite> .exit

(Where you substitute the incorrectly spelled name between the quotes above as shown.)

Now when you use the Photos.app, you won't see any blank name in the drop-down, and the ...IGNOREME... name will only display if you start typing periods for the name suggestion.