Do Faces sync now & would I have to resync after full release?!

[gelorobinson]

This is a question to everyone that has deployed iOS11 beta.

My concern is that Faces may sync during the beta period but then need to resync after full release.

Also, does anyone know how iCloud handles Face syncing when consolidating from photos tagged on different devices? Does it act similarly to contacts where I can choose whether it merges or replaces?

Any insight would be helpful to me.

Thanks so much in advance.

 

[bripab007]

That's a good question I'd like to know the answer to as well. I'd say we probably shouldn't count on the Photos iCloud metadata lasting through the betas on carry on into production versions, so don't put too much effort into fixing up your Photos library just yet.

As for how the Faces sync, as I understand it: each device does its own on-device face detection to start building up the People album, but when you confirm faces as being a particular person or specifically name a person or add to favorites on a device, that info is what gets synced to all other devices. Then those devices, in turn, use the new confirmed faces to more precisely match more of that person(s) on-device.

It's like your own little distributed, low-power compute environment.