Question :
While going through photos in Photos.app, I opened the People-library to see if there were any new faces that I should identify to connect them to the right person.
To my surprise I found that some people had 2 separate entries in the People-library : they were listed once with a group of photos with them in it, and another time with another group of photos that also had them in it, but the 2 groups were completely separate.
Is there an easy way to tell Photos.app that both are the same person ?
Answer :
The easiest way to make Photos.app see both groups of photos as referring to the same individual is to merge the 2 entries,. To do so, do this :
- open Photos.app
- listed at the left of the window that opens, you’ll see ‘Library’
- select the ‘People’ chapter from the list
- in the window that opens, you will see thumbnails of various people, each representing a group of photos that are identified to have that one person on them
- if you see a duplicate (i.e. if you see that any particular person is listed twice), select one, then press [CMD] and select the other one with this person in them
- then right-click on the last thumbnail (of the 2) you have selected and select ‘Merge 2 people’ from the dropdown menu
- now, both entries will be reduced to only one with all those photos in it
That’s is !
enjoy 😉
MacManus.nl 
Hello! I have the opposite problem. I need to “unmerge” people.
There are two sisters in separate People albums but Photos.app keeps merging them as one person. I have to undo it and do the correct the facial identification manually. I have done it several times, but the app keeps merging them back over and over again. It checks one sister and asks me to hit OK to confirm it. It is misleading and I end up pressing ok to the wrong person and they are merged again. I feel I am drying ice. It is very frustrating. Specially there are about 4 thousand pictures to go over.
Is there a way to disconnect them or an easier way to tell Photos.app that they are not the same person ?
@Leone :
Thanks for your feedback.
Great question.
I’m sorry to inform you that you’ve probably hit one of the limitations of the Faces/People-feature in Photos.app…
I’ve only encountered the Faces/People-feature continuously suggesting mis-merges in case of identical twins…
The ‘solution’ I have come up with is to never click use the ‘Confirm Additional Photos’ option for identical twins, and just select their faces manually…
But if you have identical twins as extremely close relatives (or best friends) I can imagine that method will get extremely annoying.
So, just like you have trained yourself over the years in distinguishing between the two identical friends, you might be able to train the artificial intelligence (AI) of the Faces/People-feature by keeping on feeding it with hundreds or even thousands of manually checked photos, to be finally able to trust the AI to do distinguish them correctly…
Apart from that :
If you have manually merged two individuals by mistake, and you immediately catch yourself while doing so, you could use the CMD-Z key combo to un-merge them.
But if it was an automatic merge (as you seem to indicate)… there is no feature available to un-merge both individuals in the Photos.app itself, so your best option would probably be to bring back a TimeMachine-backup of your Photos database.
I hope this helps a little…
And if you come up with a far better solution for this, please report back !
Thanks 😉