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Mistic007

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 13, 2014
9
1
I recently migrated photo management from doing everything with finder to using the photos app. And for the most part I am very pleased with it.

Of course I wanted to tag my family & friends using the people function, so that I can quickly recall pictures regarding specific people. But as we all know, the face detection functionality is not yet 100% accurate at recognising who is the face in the picture. So I end up browsing through hundreds of faces in the 'add new people screen'.

Having quite a large library (+-35gb) I have quite a lot of strangers(200+ I estimate), who happen to be in my pictures, show up in the 'add new people screen'. Unfortunately this means that every time I import a cache of pictures I have to scroll through all of them again to find the 5 or 6 new pictures of my family and friends I actually wanted to tag. Which is time consuming and mildly annoying.

But unfortunately Apple didn't build a 'stranger' function in the Photos app, so you keep having all those strangers waiting to be tagged in the 'add new people' screen.

I thought about consolidating all those strangers into one person, and just hide that one. But I'm wondering if that would not make matters even worse. Then you have an persona with about 200 different faces. I wonder if that would drive the face detection functionality crazy, and accidentally tags family and friends I do want to tag as the stranger persona.

So have any of you guys experienced the same annoyance with this? And how are you dealing with it, any tips?
 

tgara

macrumors 65816
Jul 17, 2012
1,154
2,898
Connecticut, USA
I recently migrated photo management from doing everything with finder to using the photos app. And for the most part I am very pleased with it.

Of course I wanted to tag my family & friends using the people function, so that I can quickly recall pictures regarding specific people. But as we all know, the face detection functionality is not yet 100% accurate at recognising who is the face in the picture. So I end up browsing through hundreds of faces in the 'add new people screen'.

Having quite a large library (+-35gb) I have quite a lot of strangers(200+ I estimate), who happen to be in my pictures, show up in the 'add new people screen'. Unfortunately this means that every time I import a cache of pictures I have to scroll through all of them again to find the 5 or 6 new pictures of my family and friends I actually wanted to tag. Which is time consuming and mildly annoying.

But unfortunately Apple didn't build a 'stranger' function in the Photos app, so you keep having all those strangers waiting to be tagged in the 'add new people' screen.

I thought about consolidating all those strangers into one person, and just hide that one. But I'm wondering if that would not make matters even worse. Then you have an persona with about 200 different faces. I wonder if that would drive the face detection functionality crazy, and accidentally tags family and friends I do want to tag as the stranger persona.

So have any of you guys experienced the same annoyance with this? And how are you dealing with it, any tips?

I simply hide the strangers.

Sometimes the same person will show up in one or more separate photos after Face Detection, so I merge all of those. I'm told this has the added benefit of making the facial recognition smarter, at least with respect to that particular person. The converse is also true, as you alluded to above.... merging together complete strangers will probably make a mess of things as far as facial recognition is concerned.
 
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