Question :

I have imported my old iPhoto database into Photos.app as you described in your post on this subject. [click here to view the original post] But now I’ve got them into Photos.app it turns out that the faces I had tagged when I was still using iPhoto are not automatically recognized by the Faces function of Photos.app…

Is there any way to solve this ?

Answer :

Yes, there is, but it’s not as easy as you might have hoped…

There are 2 sides to your question, so let’s answer both separately :

1. How to find people in pictures imported from iPhoto ?
2. How to get people from iPhoto pictures into Photos.app Faces database ?

HOW TO FIND PEOPLE IN PICTURES IMPORTED FROM iPHOTO ?

When you import an iPhoto database into Photos.app the faces you had tagged way back then are not recognized as Faces, but as Keywords… so the easiest way to find pictures of  these people is this :

• open Photos.app
• click on “Photos” in the list on the left (the top option, in the Library chapter)
• then click on the “Showing: All Items”-button (top right, just below the “Search” field)
• from the pulldown menu, select “Keyword Manager”
• in the separate “Keywords”-window that pops up, in the bottom part, named “Keywords” you will find labels with all the names of the people you had tagged in Faces of iPhoto
• select the label of the person you were looking for (don’t mind that the label is greyed out, in this situation they are still selectable) and drag&drop it into the top part, named “Quick Group”
• then click on the red button top left to close the “Keywords”-window
• now, back in the main view of Photos.app, click on the “Showing: All Items”-button (again…)
• from the pulldown menu, select the name of that particular person at “Show Only Keywords”
• now, you will only see pictures with this particular person you where looking for
• scroll through the photos and find the pictures you were looking for
• remember to put the “Showing Only: …”-button back to “Showing: All Items” before you quit Photos.app

HOW TO  GET PEOPLE FROM iPHOTO PICTURES INTO PHOTOS.APP FACES DATABASE ?

After you have created keywords for people you were searching for in Photos.app, you can start to get them into the Faces database of Photos.app… to do that, do this :

• make sure that the button top right is labeled “Showing Only:…” (in which the dots are substituted by the person’s name)
• now, dubble-click on a photo that the person is in
• the photo will enlarge and all faces that are recognized as faces will have a circle around them with a label below them saying “unnamed”
• if the face of the person you had in mind does have a unnamed-label, click on the label and substitute the “unnamed” by typing the person’s real name over it
• if the face of the person you had in mind did not get a label automatically, you will have to add it by hand… to do so, do this :
  • click on the “info ( encircled i )”-button top right
  • in the popup window that opens, click on the “plus ( encircled + )”-button
    • make sure that you do this when the name tags are visible in the photo, else it will have no effect
    • if the name tags aren’t displayed, click anywhere on the picture and they will reappear
  • when you click the “plus”-button, a circle wit ha name tag labeled “Click to Name” will appear in the middle of the picture
  • drag this circle over to the face of the person you would like to tag
    • if the circle is too big or too small, you can adjust its size by moving the dot on the right side of the circle
    • if for some reason you want to delete the circle, click on the X-sign on the left edge of the circle
  • then click on “Click to Name” and typ the name of the person whose face is in the circle
  • when done with this picture, proceed to the next picture by swiping from right to left
  • when done with tagging, go back by double-clicking anywhere on the picture
    • after that, you can even get out of the selection of this particular person’s photos by going to the “Showing Only:…”-button and changing it into “All Items” (so the button will say “Showing: All Items”)

Yes, it a painstakingly labor-intensive job to put all those name tage back in to each and every old picture, but you will have to do this for a lot of old pictures before Photo.app’s own Faces function will start to recognise and label people in those old pictures automatically…

enjoy 😉