Photos "Unnamed" vs "Click to Name"

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Level 1

8 points

Photos "Unnamed" vs "Click to Name"

I am currently using Photos 2.0. My library is updated from an old iPhoto library.

Recently, while attempting to name all the people in my photos, I found that unnamed circles are listed as both "Unnamed" and "Click to Name". (I am guessing it is related to iPhoto since these pictures are 2014 and older.) Some pictures have both.

When trying to assign People, I am able to delete the circles that read "Click to Name" but I am not able to delete the "Unnamed".

Is there something that I can do to clean this up? I am attempting to clean this Photos library up.

Thank you!

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.5)

Posted on Jul 26, 2017 5:35 AM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

200,645 points

Jul 26, 2017 5:45 AM in response to gretta333

Faces marked with "Click to name" have previously been manually added on on of your devices. The manually added faces can be removed by clicking the "x". Faces detected automatically by Photos's Face detection are showing as "unnamed" and cannot been removed at all. Only these faces will be used by Photos, when it tries to learn the face of a person and to recognize it again in more photos. So you should primarily name the faces with "Unnamed" below them and delete redundant circles with "Click to name".

If there are faces of strangers that you do not care about, hide them from the People album.

Are you planning to upgrade to High Sierra in the autumn? In High Sierra the faces recognition procedure will change considerably. Faces will sync between devices, if you are using iCloud Photo Library, and there will probably an option to reset the faces database (macOS High Sierra Preview - Apple). If you are planning to upgrade in a few month and are using Photos on more than one device, I would not invest too much work into the faces albums right now.

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