Q: Using Face recognition in Photos for Mac (Sierra)
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Sep 22, 2016 9:14 AMby Jerry Dammers,Contrary to my earlier suggestion, it appears that maybe the Photos app does use faces logged from previous manual face recognition - my Mac that had no faces previously recognised has very few identified, whereas a different library on a different Mac that did have faces previously identified has significantly more faces.
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Sep 22, 2016 1:12 PMby léonie,Does this mean that the Photos app needs to be closed and the Mac plugged in and open? Or can the app be open (but not in use) and the Mac shut?
That is a bit ambiguous,
I tested it both ways, and as long as I have not been using Photos I found a few more people in the "Add People" section of the Peoples album, whether Photos had been quit or not. It seems to suffice that we are not actively using Photos.
It seems to suffice that photosanalysisd (photo analysis Damon) is running. You can check this in the Activity Monitor.app. search for "photosanalysisd".
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Sep 23, 2016 2:55 AMby Jerry Dammers,Jerry Dammers wrote:
However the face recognition function appears to be a vast improvement in identifying faces (might be wrong, but it does not appear to use the faces generated by manual recognition).
Looks like I might possibly be wrong on both counts here.
In addition to my main library of 30,000 photos to which I've added faces, locations, keywords etc over many years, I have two additional Photo libraries on a different Mac with approx 2,500 photos each (with no metadata added by me).
The two other libraries have now completed their scan and the results are poor - e.g. one family member who is on about 25% of the photos has only been identified in 3 photos.
The 30,000 library where I had previously manually added faces has scanned better (presumably due to the existing faces that had been recognised) but I still can't scan for any of the generic terms that I understand should now be available (e.g. dog).
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Sep 23, 2016 4:05 AMby léonie,Is the photoanalysisd process still running on your libraries?
It took several days before the categories showed more than just a few photos in my libraries, and the results differ a bit and the categories include a few false positives.
Searching for "Dog", for example, will include a few cats.
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Sep 23, 2016 4:15 AMby Jerry Dammers,Yes I'm pretty sure they've completed their search - but only because the screen that advised how many scanned/left to scan has disappeared
Curiously the results for generic terms (labelled as "categories" in the search box?) on the libraries without any previous metadata added/amended are marginally better than my library where I manually added faces added (I even had my own Faces categories for horses and animals)
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Sep 23, 2016 4:51 AMby léonie,It is not clear, what the artificial intelligence algorithm to classify the categories is using. I suspect it is using the titles, locations, keywords as well, not only the image itself.
So, if you annotated a photo with a category, it might be classified based on the metadata.
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Sep 29, 2016 12:21 AMby Jerry Dammers,I have identified faces in approx 10,000 photos of my 30,000 library.
IIRC, in iPhoto & Aperture, you could confirm or reject about 100 small thumbnails per screen of photos/faces of an individual.
In Photos, the only process I've found so far is where I get a single face to accept/reject via Yes/No, and then move to the next single photo/face - which will be virtually useless for confirming photos in my remaining 20,000 photos.
Is there a process in Photos for "batch changing" large numbers of faces in one go?
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Sep 29, 2016 1:07 AMby léonie,DDon't' use "confirm additional faces" right away. I first go to "add" at the bottom of the People album, then select all strangers and add and merge them To get them out of the way. That makes it easier to select several faces of the persons I want to name at once.
WIth th the strangers weeded out it becomes easier to confirm additional faces.
oonly, I did not want photos to use a mixture of stranger faces to classify other faces, so I deleted all faces circles from these photos, leaving blank thumbnails.
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Sep 29, 2016 1:47 AMby Tommi 7711,Has somebody the same issue as I have - the face recognition doesn't continue. I have always about 12.000 photos which have still to be scanned. I tried it with a restart, keep Photos open, keep it closed but nothing happens. The program photoanalysisd is in background but doing nothing.
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Sep 29, 2016 5:26 AMby Tommi 7711,I found the solution for my issue. Somehow in the photo library the flag was set to optimize the disk space of my MacBook (wasn't the case before the upgrade to Sierra). About 12000 pictures were already locally removed. Seems that exactly these pictures have been the ones which could not be longer scanned. After changing the settings the face detection started to continue with the scan.
