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Does the Catalina photos update add unnamed people to People Album?

I updated to Catalina about two months ago, and since then, the Photos app has been slogging through my relatively large photo library (753GB) at an appallingly slow pace. Until two weeks ago the people album said it was updating in the background, with no indication of what it was doing. Now the people album opens automatically, but there are no new unnamed faces in it. It had 208 faces in it before the upgrade and it has 208 faces after all the updating, scanning, and analyzing. The existing faces were manually added months and months ago. Since then I've imported tens of thousands of new photos with new people in them. Is Catalina supposed to identify unnamed faces and add them to the People Album for me to name, or do I have to go into individual photos to name people the before they will be added to the People Album? I was hoping the app would at least find the people for me and that I could then name them rather than having to do both.

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.15

Posted on Dec 30, 2019 9:22 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Dec 30, 2019 10:18 AM

JeffNYC2 wrote:

... Now the people album opens automatically, but there are no new unnamed faces in it. It had 208 faces in it before the upgrade and it has 208 faces after all the updating, scanning, and analyzing. .... Is Catalina supposed to identify unnamed faces and add them to the People Album for me to name, or do I have to go into individual photos to name people the before they will be added to the People Album?


Photos 5.0 on Catalina will scan any new photos for faces, recognise identical faces and create People albums for them. But it will not automatically add the new faces to the People album. The new people albums will be hidden, until you add them to the People album. the reason for this is, that there may be many strangers in the background, that would clutter up the People album, so Photos is waiting for you to add the people you are interested in.


Try the following:

  • In Photos, go to the main menu bar and enable the option "View > Show Faces names"
  • Open one of the new photos with unnamed faces and view it enlarged. If there is a faces circle, scroll down to the details section. If there is a faces thumbnail, click it to open the hidden album for this person. At the bottom of the album should be an option to add this album to the People album. Add this album, then name it.




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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Dec 30, 2019 10:18 AM in response to JeffNYC2

JeffNYC2 wrote:

... Now the people album opens automatically, but there are no new unnamed faces in it. It had 208 faces in it before the upgrade and it has 208 faces after all the updating, scanning, and analyzing. .... Is Catalina supposed to identify unnamed faces and add them to the People Album for me to name, or do I have to go into individual photos to name people the before they will be added to the People Album?


Photos 5.0 on Catalina will scan any new photos for faces, recognise identical faces and create People albums for them. But it will not automatically add the new faces to the People album. The new people albums will be hidden, until you add them to the People album. the reason for this is, that there may be many strangers in the background, that would clutter up the People album, so Photos is waiting for you to add the people you are interested in.


Try the following:

  • In Photos, go to the main menu bar and enable the option "View > Show Faces names"
  • Open one of the new photos with unnamed faces and view it enlarged. If there is a faces circle, scroll down to the details section. If there is a faces thumbnail, click it to open the hidden album for this person. At the bottom of the album should be an option to add this album to the People album. Add this album, then name it.




Does the Catalina photos update add unnamed people to People Album?

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