How to Keep Your People Tagging Up-to-date
People. People. People. . .
Let's "face" it. Pictures of our friends, family, the people we miss, the people we met, and people we may never see again are the foundation of our Photos Libraries. Selfies, portraits, the camera self-timer - so much of our iPhone camera app is designed to help us capture and preserve the people in our lives.
People tagging is one of the big features that sets Apple Photos apart from just browsing through your pictures in the Finder or the simple set of thumbnails in other organizing software. It's behind-the-scenes automatic processing that reduces the manual labeling we used to have to spend hours doing. With tens of thousands of photos and dozens of important people in our lives, taking that task off the table is a huge savings in time and convenience.
In the same way that Apple uses Face Recognition to unlock our iPhones, Apple Photos can scan the faces in all the pictures in our Library. If we then add names to the faces, AP can find and label other pictures of the same people already in the library, when they appear in a new photo or when they are imported from an email. With Machine Learning (ML) Photos can also start to understand relationships and create events, memories, and groups, offering us an even richer experience with our photos.
FINE TUNING PEOPLE RECOGNITION
To make People tagging work best, it's important to update every so often, because the processing is ongoing when other tasks are complete. Apple Photos loves feedback (don't we all?) about whether it's doing a good job or not. To help the process, just do this:
Go to the People tab in Mac Photos (Go to Albums > People & Places on iPhone) and select a Person.
If you are presented with a "Confirm Additional Photos" (on iPhone it's "There are additional photos for review") dialogue, go ahead and offer feedback about the accuracy. Uncheck any that aren't correct.
If there is no prompt, you can scroll to the bottom and see if there is an off to "Confirm Additional Photos" (on iOS tap the 3 dots to see "Confirm Additional Photos") and see if Photos has found any more to confirm.
The more you check out People and confirm or refuse the choices that Photos has found, the more accurate will be the People tagging going forward. Eventually you will find very few questions and the new photos added will be accurately tagged.
One other note. For privacy reasons, Apple processes People ID's on each device so you may find slight differences between the people group on your Mac and your iPhone. Generally, over time, those differences go away. But it's important that you update your Face ID's on all your devices in the beginning so that each photo database gets the benefit of your feedback.
Updating People tagging takes just a few minutes every couple weeks, but it goes a long way to making your Apple Photos library a resource to enjoy for you and your family.