nueve_leon wrote: … This whole people tagging thing is a hot mess.
Right. And it all may change with the next OS.
That's why we don't just do face naming, but we include the names as Keywords. Face recognition is unique to a system, and there is no reliable universal method of including face names with the metadata in pictures. So if you send a picture to someone, or you keep a backup copy, it can have Keywords, but it won't include any of the effort you put into tagging those faces.
For me, I use Keywords for people who show up over and over .For people who don't show up much I include the names in the Caption rather than as a Keyword-- I just don't want so many Keywords.
So, I name the little circles on the faces, and Photos sends them into People albums. But then I open the People album, select them all, and add a Keyword for that person. And I do that for every album that has more than a couple of people in it. I am especially grateful that I do this when there is a new OS and bunches of the IDs disappear!
Searching by Person can be a bit flaky, as well. If I search for the person Richard, I get a bunch of people who are not me. If I search for the Keyword "Richard," then I get only me.
Name tagging is especially important for groups of people that you'll never keep straight without help.
But every one of the names above is in the Caption for the photo. My mother, grandmother, uncle, and some great-somethings are also Keywords, since I have several pictures with them in it. I'm pretty sure the dog's name is in the caption, too, but not a Keyword.
nueve_leon wrote: … This whole people tagging thing is a hot mess.
Right. And it all may change with the next OS.
That's why we don't just do face naming, but we include the names as Keywords. Face recognition is unique to a system, and there is no reliable universal method of including face names with the metadata in pictures. So if you send a picture to someone, or you keep a backup copy, it can have Keywords, but it won't include any of the effort you put into tagging those faces.
For me, I use Keywords for people who show up over and over .For people who don't show up much I include the names in the Caption rather than as a Keyword-- I just don't want so many Keywords.
So, I name the little circles on the faces, and Photos sends them into People albums. But then I open the People album, select them all, and add a Keyword for that person. And I do that for every album that has more than a couple of people in it. I am especially grateful that I do this when there is a new OS and bunches of the IDs disappear!
Searching by Person can be a bit flaky, as well. If I search for the person Richard, I get a bunch of people who are not me. If I search for the Keyword "Richard," then I get only me.
Name tagging is especially important for groups of people that you'll never keep straight without help.
But every one of the names above is in the Caption for the photo. My mother, grandmother, uncle, and some great-somethings are also Keywords, since I have several pictures with them in it. I'm pretty sure the dog's name is in the caption, too, but not a Keyword.
The Photos.app is showing the short name for the people, unless you disable it. By default the short name is the first name. If you name two people with the name Peter, the first Peter will show only the first name, the second the full name.
On a Mac you can change this in the Settings for Contacts.
I am not sure, if you need to restart the Mac as well.
Any person you name now in Photos should now show the full name instead of the short name.
People who are in your Contacts will initially offer the name that's in the contact. Those who are not in your Contacts offer a blank field and will take any name you want.
nueve_leon wrote:
• I and am busy tagging people in my photos.
That might be a futile attempt. AFAIK a system update might reset all that effort. And automatic face recognition is VERY slow and has its own will and AI...
Lately I have started to insert IPTC/XMP Captions to especially old images where I want to be as specific as I can "From top row from left John Doe, Jane Doe, etc. 2nd row John Hancock, unknown, Mark Twain, etc" and lately to new images' IPTC/XMP Keywords as John Doe; Jane Doe etc (unlike free text Captions, Keywords are separated).
That is clumsy and using circles around faces as layers would be better but AFAIK there is no such universal standard yet.
I like to do both - using keywords to save the name and adding name tags into the faces circles. This way I am seeing the named faces also on my iPhone and iPad, because the iOS devices can show the People&Pets tags, but not the keywords. I started the habit of adding keywords for the names a long time ago, when I migrated my photo libraries from iPhoto to aperture and the keywords also survived the migration from aperture to Photos, and hopefully they will survive the migration to a potential successor to Photos as well.
thanks matti,
Forgive my ignorance - but is the Photos keyword field actually written into the IPTC/XMP field of the actual photo file?
I thought captions/Keywords/location were merely recorded in a database and not written to the file.
nueve_leon wrote:
is the Photos keyword field actually written into the IPTC/XMP field of the actual photo file?
I thought captions/Keywords/location were merely recorded in a database and not written to the file.
I insert IPTC/XMP to the images (and similar metadata to movies) outside Photos.
But yes, inside Photos edited metadata goes to Photos database. You can export it as .xmp sidecars and join to the original images and movies with 3rd party tools like GraphicConverter or exiftool. But beware that Photos .xmp GPS is nonstandard, so the western and southern GPS might be put to the other side of the globe. GC and exiftool have a workaround for this flaw.
I used keyword names before they introduced face recognition, so it seemed obvious to keep it up. I really want the name tags on the faces for less obvious people, and I try to fill in the recognized but "unnamed" faces, since I figure it helps with identifying them. But with keywords in place, as I add those little circles to the backs of my daughter's heads, I begin to wonder what I'm doing this for.
Keywords, Captions, and Titles are included in the metadata
Exif and IPTC/XMP
Why first name only for some people tags?
