Photos has generated many "close up face" pictures

When looking at pictures in the Photos portion of the library I see original pictures but below all the originals are close ups of people in those same pictures. I am not looking at them through People just Photos within the Photos program.

Did you perhaps swipe the photo up? Then it is perfectly normal what you a seeing, a new feature in Photos 3.0 and not a bug.

If you look at a photo enlarged in the Photos view and then swipe up to reveal the details, you will see related people and the place. The People strip is showing thumbnails of each detected face in a photo. You will only see this, if you swipe up. For example:

Or, if more people are in the photo:

See: View photos, Live Photos, slideshows, and more in Photos on Mac - Apple Support

• View a photo’s location on a map: Scroll down to Places to see the photo thumbnail on a map. Double-click the thumbnail to see it on a larger map. Double-click it again to zoom in or display it on a grid. Click Show Nearby Photos to see other photos from nearby locations.
• View more photos of people in the photo: Scroll down to People to see the people identified in the photo. Double-click a person’s face to see other photos of that person.

sounds like a bad migration - do you still have iPhoto 9.6.1? If so use it to repair the older iPhoto library (backup first of course) and look through the other migration tips here and try again -- : Links to User tips re migrating from iPhoto to Photos

LN

Those are part of the face recognition feature of Photos.

How did you update that last library? Where are you seeing those files/images? Those face images should only be visible thru the People section of the library.

Many of the pictures are from 2003 - 2014. I'm wondering if something happened along the line during the the different iterations of updates from various iPhotos to Photos? Just weird.

Are there any folders or albums in your library with "recovered" in the name? Sometimes iPhoto or Photos will recovered add thumbnails to the library during a library repair or upgrade. This can happen, if orphaned files are discovered in the library, that are no longer connected to a photo in the library. Such orphaned files will be collected in albums withe "recovered" in the name.

Going forward, any thoughts on keeping multiple libraries "clean" without corruption as there appears to be the need to update photo libraries on a fairly regular basis? I guess the old adage of "backup, backup, backup" is a good one. Open to other pearls of wisdom.

The updating or repairing are not causing the corruption. They are just making existing problems obvious. But Apple recommends to backup the library before trying to repair it, and making a new backup before updating or upgrading is mandatory anyway.

The best cause of action is indeed sticking to a rigid backup routine and avoiding things that can cause a library corruption.

• Avoid crashes and force quitting Photos
• Avoid accessing the library from different user accounts
• Avoid accessing the library by third party applications, if the applications are directly manipulating the library
• Keep the library only on correctly formatted drives and do not use it over a network.

with no details one can only guess - it sounds like you somehow import those libraries or their contents - that s not correct, you open old libraries and migrate the library - no importing involved

LN