Duplicate people albums on iPhone and Mac

So how do I stop my iPhone creating “people groups” from photos

It is not possible. Ignore the additional people albums created on the iPhone. If you do not want duplicate people albums do not sync people with iTunes.´in addition t the ones, that Photos on the iPhone is creating.

The problem is within iPhone photos as it seems to independently go thru the people recognition process and create folders for each ... almost duplicating what I have done correctly in iPhoto on my Mac ... I simply want to turn this off and let iphotos from my Mac dictate what happens

You cannot turn face recognition off on the iPhone.

But if your Phone is using iOS 11, you could use iCloud Photo Library on your Mac and iPhone and the detected faces would sync between the iPhone and the Mac and you would not have duplicates. But that would require to sign up for enough iCloud storage to hold your complete photos library and enough storage on the ipHone to be able to hold all photos from the Mac at least optimized.

Up to date is not a version, it is a personal opinion and very often that opinion is wrong - it would be best if you actually answered the question with the version (numbers like 10.13.4 and 11.3 otherwise you may get incorrect answers

One example is that you are posting in the iPhoto for Mac forum and the latest version of iPhoto is 9.6.1 but you seem to be talking about a totally different program, Photos - so if your statements are all correct you are using iPhoto 9.6.1 with High Sierra 10.13.4 - is that what you actually have?

and the way you are transferring photos is not odd but does just that, transfers the photos and not any organization - iCloud Photo Library will sync photos and organization including people if you have High Sierra 10.13.4 and IOS 11.3 or later

You can not turn face (object) recognization off on either platform

LN

what version of the OS, of IOS and of iPhoto do you have?

How exactly are you syncing your Mac to iCloud?

LN