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In Photos I have many people tagged. Between typos & trying to match names in Contacts, I have many people who are listed multiple times. In trying to clean that up, I have attempted to edit names, but am finding mixed success. It's not clear to me which name I should consolidate to. Any tips or tricks on how to prevent this from being a frustrating exercise that I can't seem to complete?
The other has an email address appear below it, and if I select it then only the First Name of the person appears to be assigned to them
Yes, the second name with the email is from the Contacts card.
You can pick each of the two names - but each choice has different drawback.
I avoid using the Contact Card like the plague. The way the contacts are handled in Photos is either a bug or an ill-considered feature, broken by design. When I use a contact card, I cannot use the People album to look up the full names of people. And worse, I cannot use Photos at work or to show photos to casual acquaintances. It can be highly embarrassing, if we accidentally show photos of persons, that we are not on first-name basis with to other people.
The other has an email address appear below it, and if I select it then only the First Name of the person appears to be assigned to them
Yes, the second name with the email is from the Contacts card.
You can pick each of the two names - but each choice has different drawback.
I avoid using the Contact Card like the plague. The way the contacts are handled in Photos is either a bug or an ill-considered feature, broken by design. When I use a contact card, I cannot use the People album to look up the full names of people. And worse, I cannot use Photos at work or to show photos to casual acquaintances. It can be highly embarrassing, if we accidentally show photos of persons, that we are not on first-name basis with to other people.
Thank you!
Version 3, and your guidance helped me clean-up all of the messes from the past few years. Photos is definitely temperamental when it comes to assigning names to People. It did appear that, for me, the "bad" names no longer appeared as options in auto-fill once I corrected/removed all of them. I didn't reset, so I'm unsure if it really was removing them or not. Either way, I'm very happy and appreciate your taking time to help me.
Related question: Now that all the errors are corrected and my people only appear once in People, I do notice one thing: when I type in a person's name that exists in Photos already, I get 2 options to click. One is the name that correctly adds it to the main group for that person. The other has an email address appear below it, and if I select it then only the First Name of the person appears to be assigned to them. Since there is an email (their correct email per my Contacts), it appears that this 2nd photo is a lingering part of a feature in previous versions where we could basically connect a Contact record to a People record in Photos. Does this make sense? I don't seem to see any current application of that feature (as in, I can't find a method of intentionally connecting 2 such records together like we used to be able to do), so my guess is it is gone? I can definitely live without that feature if it's gone, but I did like to use it for my Contacts/People when we had it.
Thanks, again!
Thank you again for such helpful information. As seems to be the case with many bugs, just knowing I’m not crazy for failing to understand why things seem broken or off is comforting. I agree with how you choose which name to select, and will continue to use as you are also using. Perhaps one day an employee at Apple will use Photos to assign a name to one of their photos, then I’m sure this will all be resolved in a better way.
Which version of Photos are you using? The handling of the people album changed considerably between the different versions of Photos.
In Photos 3 you can combine multiple names for the same person by selecting all the different albums for the same person at the same time in the People album and right-click or ctrl click them, them and select "Merge people". or drag one people album on top of the other album to merge them.
Select a distinctive key photo for the merged People album, so you will easily recognize the the name you want to use, if you are seeing several suggestions in the list of names, when you are naming new faces.
It is not possible to get rid of the versions of the names with typos in them other by resetting the People album completely and naming all faces again.
I turned this into a user tip: Photos for Mac: Why is it only showing the first name of a person in the People Album
Let's hope so. 🙂
Multiple names for same person
