Adding Your Pets As People In Mac Photos

Photos will easily mark pictures as containing people's faces, as long as they are human. But you can also manually add your pets or anything you like to the People feature manually.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can add your pets as people in Mac Photos. 
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So when you're in the Mac Photos App it will automatically recognize the faces of people in your photos. Then you can add them as people and view them that way. For instance here in my Photos Library I have various pictures that include me, this is my sample library I use for tutorials. If I go to People you can see it includes me there. I can double-click on that and I can see photos that have my face in them. I can click here at the bottom to confirm additional photos. In addition I can go into any photo like this and I can see a label for me where it recognizes my face. That was automatic recognition of faces applied to humans. It shouldn't recognize the faces of our beloved pets, our dogs and cats. However, some of us may want to have those in the People Section so we can identify photos that have our pets in them. That can be useful for seeing photos of those pets but also for when you want to do searches that combine things like combining you and your pet to see pictures of the two of you together. 
Now if you're looking at a photo that has you in it, no matter where you're viewing it, whether it's the Library, People, or an Album you need to turn on View and then Show Face Names. Then you should see the face names up here underneath faces it recognizes. It won't always show up right away just by switching it on there. I find it is best to go back out and then in again. Then you could see it has a name there and it has the circle around the face. You can actually Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad or right click on a mouse, on this and select this is Not if it got the automatic recognition of the face wrong. You could also click here and change the name. So start typing another name and it should auto-complete or add a completely new name there.  What the two things you can't seem to do here is to remove this. Saying, maybe, this is not a face that you want recognized at all or Add one that is a face you do want recognized but it is not allowing you to do it. No amount of Control clicking or right clicking is going to do anything. 
However, if you click on the i button here to get info or go to Window, Info, or Command i, then you should see a section in here that has a list of the faces recognized. I can click on this one, for instance, and I can hit the Delete key to delete it. I can also click the Plus Button here and it will add a circle right in the middle. I can click and Drag this circle around. It's a little tricky. Sometimes you have to click on the photo first and then click on the circle. You get it to where you want. You drag this dot here to make it larger and then you could put it where you want. The x will get rid of the circle if you don't want it. Then you can click here to fill in a name. Now you can see it has two there. Not only that but I go back to People here you can see it has added that person, in this case Jack, as a person here. If I go in you'll see that there is just the one. I can confirm additional photos and it won't really work because again it is not a human face. But I can continue to do that with other photos.
So if I go to Library and I find another photo of Jack and I still have the Info Window open here I can click to Add a Face. I can drag it, enlarge it, and I can start typing the name there and you can see it automatically kind of recognizes the name and tries to look for other things in your Contacts as well. Now I've added Jack there. So now when I go back to People I can see for Jack there are now two photos. Plus now when you search for a person, like myself there, and then you search for another person now you can see it includes the photos that match both. 
Now here is one more tip. If you now quickly want to find any photos that have your dog or cat in them you can search for dog or cat. The Photos App will recognize dogs and cats in your photos and you can quickly see them. Then you can just go to the photo like that. Get Info and Add the face. 
Now unfortunately there doesn't appear to be anyway to do this in iOS or iPad OS. You have to do this on your Mac. But once you do it on the Mac you should see your dog or cat appear under People when you look in the Photos App on your iPhone or iPad. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 12 Responses to “Adding Your Pets As People In Mac Photos”

Stu Moffitt

1 year ago

So so good.
Photos is underused by many. Excellent reminder of its possibilities.
Also, another reminder that iPhone and iPad are not Macs and the power of the laptop!
And finally, the fact that work that is done on Mac can be accessed by iPhone and iPad thanks to the Apple ecosystem.

Ros Sharp

Thanks for this, Gary.
Is there a way to merge IDs in Faces? Over the years I have labeled the same person differently (eg Olivia, Livvy, Liv). I'd like to merge all the photos into one ID.

Gary Rosenzweig

Ros: Yes. Go to the main People screen in Photos, select two people. Control+click on one of those. Select Merge.

Nancy Bishopp

I love using what you have shared about Photos! I’m now off of google photos. I do have a question: on my Mac I put all of my photos (around 15,000+) into the photo app. Can I just select them all in the Photos app and copy into pictures? Guess I don’t know the difference between Pictures folder in my favorites and the Photo app??? Sorry if this is a stupid question!

Nancy: The Pictures folder is a folder in the Finder where you can store things. In addition, it is the default location for the Photos library. I don't know what you are trying to do by moving all of your pictures OUT of the Photos app and into the Picture folder. You would end up with 15,000 FILES, each a photo, in the Finder. Just leave your photos in the Photos library and access them in the Photos app.

Thank for your answer, Gary! I was trying to move all of my photos into a picture folder so I could use an app that finds duplicate photos. When my photos are is the photos.app is there an easy way to delete duplicates. Sorry for another bother!

Nancy: In macOS Ventura there will be a new feature that does that. Wait until then. For now, I would just look at your photos and try to figure out what is going on. Make sure these are really duplicates (not just viewing the same photo in two places).

Gary, thank you for take my your precious time to help me. I will definitely be signing up for your macOS Ventura course!

Dave

9 months ago

You've confirmed what I feared, that you need to tag each image individually for pets. Unlike people where it automatically looks for images with the same face. For people with pets like me and many family and friends, I have a ton of pics with animals, so tagging individually would be a pain. I hope they add this feature (like Google Photos did years ago)!

Asli Jat

Thanks for the tips, I wanted to tag my pet dog in multiple photos, rather than one by one, so searched for 'dog' & selected them all. However, when you open up the info window you are not able to then add a face.

Any suggestions for adding your pet's name to multiple photos?

Asli: When you add a face you need to position it on the photo. So it makes sense that you can't just add them in bulk like that. So you'll need to add them one-by-one. An alternative is just to add a keyword tag instead. Then you can search and have those photos show up with that tag, no need for a location in the photo, but your dog won't show up in the People section.

K dog person

6 months ago

Photos (Version 8.0) has removed almost all photos of my pets from People. I had hundreds of each dog, each individually added using the "add faces" option under the I for info. Now I'm down a dozen or two. The faces I added are almost all gone. A handful, not even all that of the photos are still included in People for a specific dog, have the "face" that I added using the "add faces" option. Most just have the paw icon.

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Adding Your Pets As People In Mac Photos

Comments: 12 Responses to “Adding Your Pets As People In Mac Photos”

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