Q: Photos - Sierra

The faces search is fully automatic.Photos will search for missing faces, if the mac is connected to a power source and the Photos.app is not used. Minimize Photos or quit it.

If not all photos have been scanned for faces, you will see a message, when you open the People album.  Is there a missage about people needing to be scanned?

Good    Let it run. It can take several days.  You may want to prevent the energy Saver in the System preferences from putting the disk to sleep for a while.

To see the full names, avoid using the names from your Contacts. If Photos can connect a named person to your Contacts, it will just use the first name.

But on the other hand I will be able to search for a contact and show all pics I have of this person from there?

if the named persons are connected to the Contact, you can ask Siri to "Show me photos of Ben" or similar.

That's what I do:

You can still use the full name of a contact.

But when you have finished entering the name, you must not click on the same name in the proposal list.

Instead, click anywhere else in the photo.

Then it will add this full name, not connected to the contact of the same name.

However, if you want to name another face the same way, the proposal will now show you two times the same name: one time from the contact, and one time the full name that you have added before.

Now you can select from the proposal list the full name that you created in the beginning. In may case, it is always shown as the first of the two proposals.

Later, in Photos, you can search for all photos for this name.

I do not know if you can ask Siri to show you photos for those names which are not contact.

I hope (and made a request) that Apple will provide a fix so that we can decide how the contact-connected photos can be displayed: just first name, or full name etc. Then I will merge my current full names with the person from my contact list. At least, that's the plan

But when you have finished entering the name, you must not click on the same name in the proposal list.

That is working, right. Only, then you can no longer use the photos easily for the profile photo on the Contact card, because the link is broken.  And Siri will not find the photos if you ask her to find photos of someone.

Thank you for the additional info, léonie !

I was not aware of the fact that I can choose profile photos for contacts from the Photos library. Until now I drag & dropped the photos on the contact.

I do not really use Siri, so I am fine with not being able to ask for photos via Siri.

To summarize, I prefer to have the full names in Photos and no Siri/Contacts connection.

But this is only my personal choice.

I need the full names too.  What is the point of naming persons in the photos, if the full name is nowhere showing?  I add the names to be able to remember the names of casual acquaintances, and need to be able to see the full name.

It is bad enough, that the Info panel does not list the names but only  a row of barely recognizable thumbnails of the faces. We get no more information from the Info panel about the persons than from looking at the photo. And if we click the faces thumbnail to open the Person album we still can see only the first name. When I then see the person is called "Frank", I have to open the Contacts and search for "Frank" and compare the profile photos to find out the last name. 

Surely the developers are joking!

My solution currently is to add all faces names as keywords as well. The advantage is, that the Info panel is showing all keywords and I can see the names in the Info panel, and thekewords are syncing across all devices. So I can se the names on the other Macs as well.