108 Macworld • March 2021HELP DESK
that allows Apple devices logged into
the same iCloud account to exchange
those signatures via iCloud sync
without Apple having the ability to
decrypt and view it. Apple doesn’t
send names or images, just these
shorthand notations.
With iCloud Photos enabled, this
should allow the same photos to have
the same people identified in each of
them. In practice, I’ve found facial-
recognition generally poor. Whenever
I revisit a person’s entry in the People
album, I find a lot of photos containing
unrelated faces. No matter how much
I sort and train, it never seems to get
much better. And the set of imageson my iPhone and Mac
don’t seem to match
for people, either.
Readers have
written in about this
problem lately and a
related one. If you opt to
not use iCloud Photos,
which can rack up
iCloud storage fees if
you have a fair number
of images, but instead
use iTunes (Mojave
and earlier) or the
Finder’s sync interface
(Catalina and later)
for synchronization,
faces may be out of joint.
Photos does attach a person’s
name to an image’s metadata, so
that syncing passes that along in a
way that Photos on another device
can read it and assign that person to
the correct identity in Photos. But it
doesn’t bring sorting order or other
parameters along. Because the facial
recognition isn’t synced via iCloud,
using direct iTunes or Finder sync
also seemingly means ID performed
on one platform may not be the
‘truth’ (the most accurate associated
information for a piece of data),
leaving Photos to wrestle with which
faces to tag.No matter how many times I try to identify my dad to
Photos, it keeps reverting to bad matches. Here, only
three of six matches are correct.108 Macworld • March 2021HELP DESK
that allows Apple devices logged into
the same iCloud account to exchange
those signatures via iCloud sync
without Apple having the ability to
decrypt and view it. Apple doesn’t
send names or images, just these
shorthand notations.
With iCloud Photos enabled, this
should allow the same photos to have
the same people identified in each of
them. In practice, I’ve found facial-
recognition generally poor. Whenever
I revisit a person’s entry in the People
album, I find a lot of photos containing
unrelated faces. No matter how much
I sort and train, it never seems to get
much better. And the set of imageson my iPhone and Mac
don’t seem to match
for people, either.
Readers have
written in about this
problem lately and a
related one. If you opt to
not use iCloud Photos,
which can rack up
iCloud storage fees if
you have a fair number
of images, but instead
use iTunes (Mojave
and earlier) or the
Finder’s sync interface
(Catalina and later)
for synchronization,
faces may be out of joint.
Photos does attach a person’s
name to an image’s metadata, so
that syncing passes that along in a
way that Photos on another device
can read it and assign that person to
the correct identity in Photos. But it
doesn’t bring sorting order or other
parameters along. Because the facial
recognition isn’t synced via iCloud,
using direct iTunes or Finder sync
also seemingly means ID performed
on one platform may not be the
‘truth’ (the most accurate associated
information for a piece of data),
leaving Photos to wrestle with which
faces to tag.No matter how many times I try to identify my dad to
Photos, it keeps reverting to bad matches. Here, only
three of six matches are correct.