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Options for tagging PEOPLE photos are incorrect since upgrading from High Sierra to Catalina

I just upgraded directly from High Sierra to Catalina 10.15.3 this week. I opened the Photos app today to tag some recent photos of my daughter. I have a tile in my PEOPLE favorites labeled with her first name. I opened that tile, noticed the last photo was dated November 2019, and thought I would just CONFIRM ADDITIONAL PHOTOS and be done. Facial recognition didn't find any of the approximately 50 photos, and I thought that was strange. So I opened one of the recent photos and proceeded to manually add her face. However, I was not given the correct tagging option which normally was her first name only. Instead, I was presented with a first-last name option and different face. It was a face from one of my more recent photos. I went ahead and tagged several of the more recent photos with the first-last name tag, thinking it would create a first-last name tile among the tiles in my PEOPLE album, which would hopefully enable me to merge it with my already established first-name-only favorite tile. However, NO FIRST-LAST NAME TILE WAS CREATED. I don't know what to do. I am able to access the recent photos I tagged by typing her first-last name in the SEARCH field, but they are not among my other PEOPLE tiles. I tried a few other people and experienced the same problem of not being presented with the usual tagging option. Long story short, it appears that after upgrading to Catalina, I am unable to add my photos to their previously established tile in my PEOPLE album, and after tagging with a new tagging option being presented to me, no tiles are being created for the new tagging option. Is this a bug?


Photos Version: Version 5.0 (111.17.170)

macOS Catalina: Version 10.15.3

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.15

Posted on Feb 16, 2020 4:44 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 17, 2020 1:43 AM

. However, NO FIRST-LAST NAME TILE WAS CREATED

You may have created a second People album for your daughter, that is still hidden.

When you view a photo with her face, and there is a thumbnail with her face in the Info or below the enlarged photo in the Details section,

  • click the tiny thumbnail to open the People album for this face.
  • When the People album opens, scroll down to the commands at the bottom of the album. If the album is still hidden, you should see a command "Add to People Album" at the bottom of the album. Click this. The album should appear at the bottom of the People album and you can drag it onto the main album of your daughter to merge it into her main album.


Photos 5.0 on Catalina is treating the faces slightly different from the previous versions. It does not allow us to assign the same person name to two different faces in the same photo. If Photos should have incorrectly labelled a different face as your daughter, you will not be able to assign her name to the correct face, unless you remove her name from the wrong face.

While Photos is still updating the faces database, I would enable the the option "View > Show Face names", if you have not already done so, so you can see exactly, if the names have been assigned to the correct faces.



3 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 17, 2020 1:43 AM in response to kcbudyzr

. However, NO FIRST-LAST NAME TILE WAS CREATED

You may have created a second People album for your daughter, that is still hidden.

When you view a photo with her face, and there is a thumbnail with her face in the Info or below the enlarged photo in the Details section,

  • click the tiny thumbnail to open the People album for this face.
  • When the People album opens, scroll down to the commands at the bottom of the album. If the album is still hidden, you should see a command "Add to People Album" at the bottom of the album. Click this. The album should appear at the bottom of the People album and you can drag it onto the main album of your daughter to merge it into her main album.


Photos 5.0 on Catalina is treating the faces slightly different from the previous versions. It does not allow us to assign the same person name to two different faces in the same photo. If Photos should have incorrectly labelled a different face as your daughter, you will not be able to assign her name to the correct face, unless you remove her name from the wrong face.

While Photos is still updating the faces database, I would enable the the option "View > Show Face names", if you have not already done so, so you can see exactly, if the names have been assigned to the correct faces.



Feb 17, 2020 1:19 AM in response to kcbudyzr

Please be aware that when naming people in photos, if the name suggestion comes from an entry in your Contacts application, then the name under the face in Photos will only show the first name of the person, not the person's full name. Apple provides no configuration settings for controlling this behaviour, which can lead to very confusing situations where everyone with the same first name, but different last names, will show up with the same name in Photos. I have no idea what Apple was thinking.


Please Apple, listen to your customers and do not make Photos so simple that it actually becomes confusing and difficult to manage!


There is only one way that I have discovered to show the full name of a Person in Photos that has been tagged from a Contacts entry:


  1. Display the People tab/area in Photos for macOS.
  2. singe-click on a person that shows only a first name.
  3. Display the "info" window, if it is not already displayed, by clicking Cmd-i.
  4. The Info window should show the full name of the person if the person was tagged from a Contacts entry.


This procedure is a lot of work, so it is not a replacement for simply being able to see the full name of a person under the Person's album or under a tagged face for a person, but at least this is a way to discover whether you actually named a person with only his/her first name, or if you named a person by using a name suggestion from your Contacts app.

Options for tagging PEOPLE photos are incorrect since upgrading from High Sierra to Catalina

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