Photos unable to move/resize manually added face

Does it work, if you add a new face somewhere? Is it only broken for faces you added some time ago?

There is one more thing you may want to check.If the problem occurs for each and every manually added photo, try to remove the Photos preferences.

To delete the Photos preferences files:

• Quit Photos, if it is running.
• Open your user library in your home folder.

Delete the complete folder ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Photos/ and restart the Mac, then try again.Your user library may still be hidden.

• To reveal the hidden User Library:
  • Bring the Finder forward by clicking on the Desktop or the Finder icon in the Dock.
  • Select your user/home folder (with the house icon in the Finder sidebar)
  • With that Finder window as the front window, press the key combination ⌘J to bring up the View options.
  • In the View options panel enable ’Show Library Folder’. That will make your user library folder visible in your Home folder, if it is still hidden.
  • Open your Home folder, then the Library folder, then Containers.

  Move the complete folder ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Photos to your desktop. Move the entire folder, not just the contents.

• While you are about it, delete also ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Photos.plist

Restart the Mac and try again.

After you deleted the ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Photos/ and preferences, Photos will not remember the location of the library and the preferences you set. You will have to set them again.

Deleting pref files will only help, if the problem is restricted to your main user account.

As a test, on the Mac, where it does not work, sign into your Mac as the guest user. Then create a new Photos library as the guest user and test, if you can move the faces circles, when working from a pristine, new account. See: Isolating an issue by using another user account

Just in case, that some system caches should be the problem, try, if restarting the Mac in safe Mode will help: Mac OS X: Starting up in Safe Mode

If it is also not working in a new user account, I would simply reinstall the system.

Boot into recovery and reinstall on top of the current system without wiping the drive.

Sometimes a sequence of upgrades can result in missing components, and reinstalling from recovery can fix this. It can also solve problems, where older third-party applications added system extensions, that are making the system unstable.

When I try and drag the small dot on the circle (or anywhere), the photo behind is dragged instead of the circle.

Try to zoom all the way it - the zoom slider to the far right.

Photos has problems to position the faces circle, while a photo is displayed enlarged. When I try to move a circle while the photo is zoomed, the cursor changes to a hand shape and will move the photo instead of the faces circle. The cursor needs to remain an arrow to be able to adjust the faces circle.

I just noticed, I forgot to mention an essential step. After deleting the Containers folder for Photos, it is important to restart the Mac. The reason is, that quitting Photos will not really quit the application. The Mac may keep it cached and ready to run, so it may simply restore the old preferences instead of recreating them. Restarting the Mac will ensure, that Photos will not be able to use the old, cached state-

I experienced this on 2 different machines with the same iCloud library (MacBook Pro and Mac Mini).

The manually added face may have been synced between your Macs and matched to an automatically added face.

Can you still move and edit manually added faces, that are no faces at all?

If I add a face, where Photos cannot detect faces, the back of a head or similar, I can always adjust the manually added circles, but for real faces it sometimes is no longer possible.

Then I'm running out of ideas.

I cannot reproduce your problem on any of my three Macs with High Sierra. But I rest the faces detection on all Macs and started over, when I upgraded to High Sierra.

But resetting the face detection will probably not help in your case, because you are having the same problem with a new library.

Did you run a hardware check on the machine that is behaving strangely?