Disable face recognition in Photos

Photos consumes quite a bit of resources running face recognition

It is not really the face recognition that is using most of the processing power, it is the object recognition. Photos is automatically classifying the photos according to the objects and events depicted in the photos. Face recognition is only a part of this, because Photos needs to know which photos are showing peoples, or friends and family members.

This cannot be disabled, because it is an integral part of how Photos is working. As a professional photographer your wife is not the target group for the Photos.app. Photos is meant to make managing a photos library easy for a casual snapper.

Seriously, do NOT use Photos otherwise it may spoil your privacy.

Use something else, any commercial DAM software will do it right and ethically.

- Adobe Lightroom

- Phase One Media Pro

- Corel Aftershot Pro

- Apple old Aperture

But not Photos. Don't be surprised if they do some datamining on your information.

Remember that nothing is really free.

Crazy talk

1 - Apple is a very strong privacy advocate

2 - there is NOTHING in Photos that could possible compromise your

3 - unless you enable it Photos has no contact with anything that is not physically on your computer

4 - If Apple were to want to data mine your data it would do so form Aperture as well as Photos and also directly from the OS - if you are terminally paranoid then you can not use any computer, phone service, watch TV and must keep all of your windows blacked out and wear your tin foil hat even inside

Gook luck with life

LN

Actually there are at least one process that runs and depends on communication to Apple servers, I think it may be called photoanalyser or similar ( not at my Mac at the moment). It and a few other processes have been absolutely hammering my external drive containing a lot of old Aperture and newer Photos libraries. The Photos libraries only exist as a a way to access the old aperture version which I did use professionally.

A temporary solution is to disconnect from the internet and then kill all processes with photo in the name within activity monitor. If your not connected to the internet they do not respawn.

I am in the process of removing those libraries onto another drive which won’t normally be connected. And when I need to access it I will disconnect from the internet.

I had thought that the photo analysis worked similarly to Siri in requiring a connection to Apple but that appears not to be the case?

The 'photo' processes respawn when disconnected from the internet but seemingly after a much longer period of time. Possibly due to other processes that were coincidentally running at the time.

I have now moved my old Aperture and Photos libraries onto a separate hard disc that will not normally be connected.

The second I deleted them from my main working photo hard drive all of those 'photo' processes stopped. Peace at last. (the drive is a loose one in a caddy and was making a lot of noise being continually accessed)

Meanwhile (overnight) since last force quit photolybraryd has written 92Gb of data somewhere, anyone know where it writes too?

But definitely do not use Photos for pro photography

Exactly. I'm constantly bemused by people who won't hesitate to send thousands on a camera back but want to use a freebie, give-away app to manage their photos. Photos is aimed squarely at the consumer end of the market, even more particularly at the person shooting with an iPhone. It uses bags of automation (moments, faces, places, categories) to make the job of managing the images easier for people who don't want to spend time doing it. If you're not that person then you're using the wrong application.

See my longer reply below. But definitely do not use Photos for pro photography it is not designed for that function.