Faces (People) in Photos has lost many that I previously identified

Question

Level 1

8 points

Faces (People) in Photos has lost many that I previously identified

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014), Processor: 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, Memory: 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3,

Graphics: AMD Radeon R9 M290X 2 GB. macOS High Sierra, Version: 10.13.1 (17B1003). Photos: Version 3.0 (3231.11.210)

I work with "People" in Photos a lot (depend on it for a lot of the graphics work I do), now it has decided that the boxes with the persons name is left blank on over half of the 100 identified boxes of the faces. Then it is saying that it is loading more pictures but cannot do it with Photos running in the background. In one case where I have used the name "Rachel Williams" for all of these years, it will only identify her as "Rachel". This would be ok if it would identify all of her pictures the same way.

I have not found any way to fix this.

iMac with Retina 5K display, macOS High Sierra (10.13.1)

Posted on Dec 13, 2017 7:02 PM

Reply

Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

194,749 points

Dec 14, 2017 3:34 AM in response to Telewischus

The High Sierra Upgrade changed the way People are handled, and it will take some time, until all photos will have been scanned again for faces.

In one case where I have used the name "Rachel Williams" for all of these years, it will only identify her as "Rachel". This would be ok if it would identify all of her pictures the same way.

There may be two possible reasons for different names of the same person:

Photos is now syncing the People albums across all your devices, that are using iCloud Photo Library on iOS 11 or macOS 10.13 or newer. If you named people on an iPhone or iPad, the names may now be syncing back to your Mac. If you do not want the name shortened, be careful to use never the suggested name from the Contacts. But then you cannot use Siri to search for people in your library.
Photos has the very inconvenient feature to shorten the names of a person to the first name, if you use the name suggested from the Contacts, and it is the first person with that particular first name. If you added the name "Rachel" once, using the Contact card, and a second time, by typing it new, you will have two different Rachels.

You may want to merge the two Rachels, by selecting the two Rachels in the People album, ctrl-clicking them, then selecting "Merge".

Reply