How do I get iPhoto's facial recognition to stick?

Question

I worked with iPhoto for a while, tagging photos with faces. Now when I view my own faces, I see "Steven Fisher may be in 8 additional photos."

I click Confirm Additional Faces, then click to confirm each additional face. I click Done. There's no error message, but I still see "Steven Fisher may be in 8 additional photos." And when I click Confirm Additional Faces, I see the same eight photos.

I can repeat this over and over again. I've recursively changed the permissions on the photo library to 777, changed the owner, rebuilt the library (letting iPhoto change the permissions), but nothing's helped. I once fixed this by completely deleting the library, re-adding all the photos to it, but it died again within a few weeks (and, of course, I lost a ton of metadata I'll never get back). What else could be wrong?

Is iPhoto reporting any errors to /Applications/Utilities/Console.app? — bneely, Dec 13 '11 at 20:20
I have the same problem. It only appears in a huge iPhoto library (more than 15K pics) and hasn't yet appeared in a smaller (~1K) library. — , Dec 31 '11 at 17:05
I have about 9k photos, which I never considered "huge." But I guess it's closer in magnitude to 15K than 1K. :) — Steven Fisher, Jan 04 '12 at 22:00

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:45

2

It didn't happen to me with the latest version of iPhoto yet. But the only solution I found to fix this kind of issues in iPhoto '09 without trashing the entire iPhoto library was to remove only the Faces related files. With the '11 version the procedure would be:

Close iPhoto
Find your iPhoto library
Right click on the photo library and chose "Show Package Content"

Show Package Content on your iPhoto library

Navigate to the Database directory

Navigate to Database

Edit: If you save your iPhoto library regularly you can restore the files instead of deleting them. To open the iPhoto bundle in Time Machine follow the instructions in this answer.

Depending on your version of iPhoto you might have to right click on Faces.db and "Show Original"

Show Original on the Faces.db link

Delete the original Faces.db in the newly opened folder.

Delete the Faces.db

Delete the 2 Faces files in the Database directory

Delete the 2 Faces* files

Relaunch iPhoto
Go to your Photos library

Go to "Photos"

Select all the pictures (click on a picture then ⌘+A to select all pictures).
Then in the "Photos" menu select "Detect Missing Faces"

enter image description here

You could also try removing only some of the files in the Faces directory before and relaunching iPhoto to check which file might be corrupted in your case.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:45

Community

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answered Mar 19 '12 at 19:35

Coyote

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This is more destructive than I'd like, obviously, but at least it keeps the other metadata intact. Thanks. – Steven Fisher Mar 20 '12 at 02:13
@StevenFisher I know, I am not entirely satisfied either... Good luck! – Coyote Mar 20 '12 at 08:26
For whatever it's worth, these files seem to be part of a Time Machine backup. So it might be possible to fetch a version from before they became corrupted. I don't know how practical this is, but I'll try it next time. – Steven Fisher Mar 21 '12 at 19:31
@StevenFisher to retrieve the files from time machine there is a simple way to access the bundle, instructions are here. – Coyote May 31 '12 at 11:50

How do I get iPhoto's facial recognition to stick?

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