Disappearing face tag

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Level 1

14 points

Disappearing face tag

Throughout the years, I've painstakingly tagged all my pictures to the right family members on Apple Photos with my Mac, even wedding pictures with 40+ persons! But once in a while, I discovered that for whaterver reason, Photos deletes some of those identifications. Some faces are no longer tagged! It is incredibly frustrating, because I have to do it all over again AND searching for the missing tags is really long! That just happened with my eldest daughter, about half of her pictures have been deleted from her "person" album (and dont, worry, i've made sure to select that it shows ALL of her picture)

And something else I just discovered. Some of the tagged photos of my daughter are still in her album on my iPhone but not on the Mac!

AND : some of these photos showing on my daughters "person" album on my iPhone have not yet been manually tagged! I guess this is just my Phone that correctly recognized my daughter's faces. But on my Mac... these pictures don't appear in her "person" album. Isn't it supposed to be the same engine that detects faces on the phone and the Mac?

I would so much like for this to work flawlessly. Any idea what might be the problem behind all of this?

MacBook Pro

Posted on Aug 21, 2022 07:57 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Cary Felbab

Level 1

15 points

Sep 6, 2022 08:49 PM in response to phil.marois

There is almost certainly a bug at work here. I can almost effortlessly recreate this issue with my large photo library. I have started tagging pictures of my dog by adding faces manually and all them add fine and display correctly when I add them. I can go into the faces page and do a get info and see the correct number of pictures. If I quit Photos and wait a few hours and restart the app, all of the new face tags have disappeared. I tried creating a new face with naming these images with new name and I get the exact same behavior even it a collection of only 30 or 40 pictures with faces tagged so I do not think it is an issue called by scale (e.g. a large library with many faces in it).

This bug seems to have existed for years. It would be nice if Apple made it a priority to fix the issue as it materially detracts from the usefulness of the feature.

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Answer 2

phil.marois Author

Level 1

14 points

Aug 21, 2022 08:44 PM in response to phil.marois

And just to add to the mystery.

Some face identification have been automatically (and correctly) added by my phone on some pictures… but these tags do not appear on my iPad. The iPad can’t recognize these faces.

Aren’t the tags supposed to be synced?

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Answer 3

Oct 5, 2022 02:22 PM in response to Cary Felbab

I agree it is a bug.

I have experienced this issue as well with Photos deleting the tag or changing some of my tagged photos to “unnamed” that I have tagged on my Mac. It has happened over multiple versions of the operating system.

It seems much more prevalent with tags that I have added manually. (In fact for the ones I add manually it removes the whole face circle)

I have repaired the Library, reimported the whole library from the iCloud among other things. None of these steps have corrected the problem.

These tags will disappear anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days.

A guess where the bug may lie is with iCloud.

I don’t know the cause but a guess would be some sore of issue with iCloud syncing. It’s as if the photos where the face info has been edited on the Mac is not updating these same photos stored in iCloud. Then later iCloud is overwriting the files/data on my Mac with the ones in the cloud causing the face data to be deleted on my Photos library on my Mac.

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Disappearing face tag

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