Q: Backing Up Photos Library with Faces
Hello,
I needed to (clean) reinstall my Mac. I backed up my Photos Library (with iCloud Photo Library turned on) on an external drive. Then deleted everything and reinstalled my system. After putting back my Photos Library and turning on iCloud, all my 4000 photos started uploading (and duplicating) to iCloud even they have already been there. I had to stop this, delete my Photos Library backup and have all the photos downloaded from iCloud. That would have been okay if I didn't lose all my face tags (which I spent a lot of time with) So how should I do it next time when reinstalling my Mac?
Thank you for any tips.
Milan
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)
Posted on Feb 11, 2016 11:31 PM
Do it exactly as you have done the first time. Make a backup of your Photo Library on an external drive and copy that library back to restore it.
Photos will upload all photos again and compare to iCloud Photo Library. It will not recognize the restored library as the identical library it used before, but it uses a duplicate detection to prevent adding duplicates. This will take as long as the original upload.
If you start with a new, empty library the projects and faces thumbnails will be lost. (Use Photos and iCloud Photo Library on multiple Mac computers - Apple Support) But the restored library has searchable faces tags. You can still search for the faces you assigned previously and use them to recreate the faces thumbnails more quickly.
But wait, until the faces detection has been run on the photos downloaded from iCloud Photo Library.
Posted on Feb 12, 2016 12:04 AM
