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Photos not scanning faces/people - suggestions for other software including online?

Photos does not seem to scan and identify people. Has a "force scan now" finally been added? Again like others (conversations now closed), it's a royal pain to name identified faces individually - list pops up, closes, pops up again, closes. good grief! To allow scanning, I have tried quitting photos and leaving computer running, and I have tried leaving photos open but minimized to the doc and leaving computer running. When I check Confirm Additional Photos none are there, despite having identified a few of the person from a new set of pictures prior. I've done these things waiting a day or a week. Nada. Occasionally a few new photos to confirm show up (often when I haven't worked on photos for months at a time) but we're talking 5 photos, maybe.


If there still aren't good solutions, I'm at the point of frustration where I'm game to move to a different program for organizing my photos. Do you all have suggestions for the best, actually functional, software to use? Face recognition is so powerful these days.


Running BigSur (11.6), Photos on the internal hard drive, iCloud not on, on an older iMac w/ 1/3 of the 1 TB solid state hard drive free, 32 GB RAM


Thanks in advance for the help / input / advice!!


iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Dec 22, 2021 6:57 AM

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8 replies

Dec 23, 2021 6:50 AM in response to rahuf

Yes, the photos are scanned only once to detect faces, until something changes, adjustments added or a system update that is changing the face detection algorithm. During the face detection Photos is trying to find faces in the photos and videos. We cannot correct the face detection, only mark additional faces that Photos has missed.

The face recognition is something else. During the face recognition the detected faces will be compared, and Photos will try to recognise the detected faces belonging to the same person. We can help Photos with the recognition by naming the detected faces of the people most important to us. Photos will only use the faces it detected itself to learn what a person looks like, not the faces circles we added. We should check, if Photos accidentally merged the faces of two people into one album, because then it cannot learn properly, what the person looks like. The face recognition can be reset. If we remove all named people from the People album, Photos will start over with the comparison of faces, but it will not scan again to detect more faces in the Photos. Only the comparison of the faces to find faces belonging to the same person will be repeated. And we will have to add again the names to the faces.






Dec 23, 2021 7:22 AM in response to rahuf

Keep typing names below the faces circles, whenever you come across a photo of a person you named already in other photos, with a faces circle showing "unnamed". Probably Photos has split the faces of that person across several albums, because it has not been confident enough to merge the separate albums as one person. If you are lucky, you will name many faces at once, if this face belongs to a group of faces recognised as the same person. By naming the faces that are remaining "unnamed" you can merge larger groups of faces. It helps to keep the faces circles showing, so you can easily see, which faces have been detected, but have missing names.



Dec 22, 2021 8:36 AM in response to rahuf

What is the status bar below the People album showing? Is it showing "0 photos of 20000 photos scanned", or is there no status line any longer?

If photos is still sowing a status bar below "people" it is still scanning for faces, but if the status bar is no longer shown, the scan is complete.


Photos is scanning each photo only once for faces, unless you add new adjustments to the photos.

But it may be confusing, that Photos is not showing the results of the scan immediately. It is keeping the recognised people hidden and initially adding only a few selected people to the People album, only a few people it has recognised as the same person in many photos. This is intentional, as Photos 4 and newer does not allow us to reject detected faces. The People album would be very cluttered, if we would find all the faces of strangers in the background or people irrelevant to us in the People album. If you want to see more people in the People album, you have to find a photo of the person you want to add, where Photos could detect a face, then name the face to add the person.

Until you have set up the People album with all people you want to name, I would enable the option "View > Show Faces Names". this way you will see circles around all faces recognised by Photos. Typing a name into the name field below the circle will add the person to the album. Can you see circles around the faces of people, when you view your photos enlarged? Or are there still many photos, where faces circles are missing - even on portrait photos with clearly visible faces?




Dec 22, 2021 9:24 AM in response to rahuf

What's your budget? Among the alternatives:


Adobe Lightroom. This is a cloud app, not dissimilar to Photos but far more powerful

Adobe Lightroom Classic: Closer to Apple's Aperture app, more of interest to raw shooters, really

Mylio: a very good consumer app.


There are others, of course, depending on your requirements.


Dec 23, 2021 6:05 AM in response to léonie

Thanks for this - there is no status bar below the People album, so I'm guessing all photos have been scanned. There are many circles around faces (yes, Show Faces Names is on) and many without any assignment despite them being the most shown (and already identified) people. Are you saying that after an initial scan Photos will never "go back" and assign people's names to those faces unless something about the photo is changed so that effectively it shows up as a new photo?

Thanks.

Dec 23, 2021 6:15 AM in response to Yer_Man

Thanks so much - I'll look into those. Mylio looks like it has lots of Photos same functionality.

The Adobe products could be good though - more powerful, and w/ cloud storage, though I certainly do prefer paying up front to having a subscription. Especially with cloud storage - you're kinda trapped there at some point.

Dec 23, 2021 7:07 AM in response to léonie

Thanks - important distinction - detection vs recognition. So it is recognition that I really need, but it sounds like I would have to remove all named people (which would include, I would imagine, all the manual faces circles added and their names... lots) and let it run again.

I have checked for accidental merger of different people, and that isn't a problem (other than correcting / separating a couple people as toddlers). I've done _lots_ of helping Photos with recognition by naming detected faces of key people, and that is what I had hoped would lead to more/better recognition of Photos identified faces, but it does not seem to have any affect. Is there no way other than emptying out the People to get Photos to scan through unidentified faces and see if they match a Person?

Dec 23, 2021 11:01 AM in response to rahuf

Especially with cloud storage - you're kinda trapped there at some point.


You're not. If you use Adobe's Lightroom and stop paying the subscription you have an entire year to download your images from the app. With Classic, if you stop paying the subscription you can continue using the app as a manager, just cannot edit anymore. There's a lot of misinformation about these subscriptions out there so it's worth checking carefully.

Photos not scanning faces/people - suggestions for other software including online?

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