IPhoto users - What to do with unknown faces?

Asked by YoBob (12846

) March 15th, 2011

Ok, now that I have my shiny new iMac, I am importing my gabillion family photos into iPhoto. The faces feature is nothing short of brilliant. However, as I start building the library of faces of friends and family I am also getting a pretty hefty collection of unknown faces that appear in the background of many images.

This is a problem because as the number of unknown faces creeps up iPhoto will keep asking you about them as it tries to associate a name to the unknown face.

I’ve thought about creating a generic “person” named “Unknown” and just dumping them all in there, but I can’t help but wonder if this would hose up the recognition algorithm.

Is there a correct way to tell iPhoto that I don’t know this face, don’t ask me about it again?

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2 Answers

The only way that I know to deal with these unknown faces that I don’t want to name is deleting the box around those faces.

In my version of iPhoto (I think there is a newer version now) , you can browse through your photos in “Name” mode, and faces will be framed with little boxes with their names. When you hover over a box, a button comes up to delete that box.

I wouldn’t suggest creating a generic “unknown person” since the faces will still be vastly different and it ultimately won’t solve your problem. I wish there was a better way than just deleting each of the unwanted faces, though!

Good luck!

ParaParaYukiko (6116

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Following up on the idea of giving them all a name, how about Al for For All I know. I don’t know if that would be easier than deleting the the boxes. Do whatever is easiest.

Sunny2 (18842

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