I created a monster : reset faces in Photos

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Level 1

14 points

I created a monster : reset faces in Photos

Hi all,

I got something very weird in Photos (the latest one for High Sierra and iOS11 -- iCloud photo library is activated on all devices)

1/ I think 3 faces have been merged by mistake : let's say "Eric", "Tim" merged into "John" face

2/ Only John remains but it's totally irrelevant (mixed pictures of 3 different people).

3/ I've decided to reset John : select All pictures and remove the face ("John is not in these pictures")

I got a situation where i have no more Eric, or Tim, or John

- I've then named Eric and Tim faces back in their pictures: I was considering that I would teach their faces again to Photos

--> Problem : Photo automatically merges Eric & Tim and names them John !

--> Even if -in this situation- John face did not exist from me (remove at stept3 above) but Photos renames Eric & Tim by its own to Jonh

Is there any way to reset the entire Face database : I would prefer setting everyone back instead of fighting with this AI ...

Yoann

Posted on Nov 12, 2017 1:00 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

léonie

Level 10

194,647 points

Nov 13, 2017 11:00 AM in response to Yoyor94

removing a face from the Faces screen (with "remove all" or "remove this person") seems to remove the shortcut from the Faces screen but not remove the face information from the picture it self

That is the hitch - you can only reset the information about the detected faces, if you remove the albums for all named persons at once,The album with named people needs to be completely empty, or the faces database will not be reset. The people album must not contain a singe named person.

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

194,647 points

Nov 12, 2017 9:03 PM in response to Yoyor94

You can reset the faces database, if you select all people at once in the People album,ctrl-click the selection and then select "remove all". This should prompt you, if you want to reset the faces.

If you are using iCloud Photo Library, do it on all devices, before you start naming the faces again because iCloud Photos Library on High Sierra and iOS 11 is syncing the named faces across all devices.

To save most of your work, I would assign keywords with the names to all photos that have been named correctly. Select all photos in a album with correctly named people, open the Info panel with ⌘I, then enter the name as a keyword in the keyword section. I would use the underscore instead of space character when typing keywords.

This ay you can later find all photos of a previously named person by searching for the keyword.

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Answer 3

Yoyor94 Author

Level 1

14 points

Nov 12, 2017 9:12 PM in response to léonie

thanks for the help

it look like it's not enough to close my issue :

- removing a face from the Faces screen (with "remove all" or "remove this person") seems to remove the shortcut from the Faces screen but not remove the face information from the picture it self

indeed : in a photo, ⌘I still provides the face name: i can also "add this person to Face screen" again (it just add the shortcut to Faces panel) ...

- if I select all photo from a person and select "xxx is not in this photo" : this remove the face information (⌘I shows the face is unamed now)

However : when adding back a name, Photos.app seem to remember that such face's name is "John": at a certain point it will force rename the face to "John" (even if I manually rename it "Tim" for instance) ! that's crazy...

when i create a brand new "john" (with 1 picture of John as a starting point) : Photos will automatically add "Tim" & "Eric" pictures to this new face : it remember that these faces where named John ...

I've remove the John information to all my devices but when I create a new one, it automatically syncs to John+Eric+tim pictures ...

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