iPhone "People" data lost in camera roll on new phone!?

[matc]

I just received a replacement iPhone 8 and while the restoring process in general is amazing I'm shocked to see that the in the "people" album it is now starting to scan all photos again! With over 50k pictures in the iCloud this will not only take ages, also it looks like I have to re-do all my efforts in of manually identifying people. This is just unbelievable - am I missing something? Why is this information not part of the backup?

I can't imagine Apple wants us to buy a new iPhone every year and store as much data in the cloud as possible then they are lacking backup functionality on that basic level!?

 

[TimFL1]

The album will more or less come out the same again. Here's how the iCloud People album syncing works:
- ML runs over all your photos, finding faces and grouping them where applicable
- ANY manual input you give (e.g. saying face xyz is person xyz and that face is also xyz, merge them) is synced to the cloud
That manual input is the only info that is stored in your iCloud storage, no names or faces.

That's why it takes a while, cause it has to do all the ML processing again on new installations. But the process is the same, so the result is the same (with your manual input taken into account). Give it 2-3 days and it should be done.

 

[matc]

The album will more or less come out the same again. Here's how the iCloud People album syncing works:
- ML runs over all your photos, finding faces and grouping them where applicable
- ANY manual input you give (e.g. saying face xyz is person xyz and that face is also xyz, merge them) is synced to the cloud
That manual input is the only info that is stored in your iCloud storage, no names or faces.

That's why it takes a while, cause it has to do all the ML processing again on new installations. But the process is the same, so the result is the same (with your manual input taken into account). Give it 2-3 days and it should be done.

Ah, got it, thanks! So the manual input is not lost, that's a relief. But then I wonder why it's not synced across devices, it looks like on my Mac the whole people feature is completely separate...

 

[xerxers]

How do I go about doing a people search on my photos. Only a very few currently have been identified but would like to have all photos processed.

TIA