You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Apple's Photos on MacOs: how to remove "ghost" name tags

Hello,


I have made a smart album to show all the photos that have a certain name tag.



The album shows 7 photos.

In none there is such a tag. All of those photos show no name tag at all.


What's more, if I bring up the "info" window, I can see that for each of the pictures, the tag is present :



Anyone knows how to remove those "ghost" name tags from those photos ?

I use Apple Photos Version 10.0 (721.0.150) on MacOs 15.2 (24C101).


Thanks

Mac mini, macOS 15.2

Posted on Dec 25, 2024 2:05 AM

Reply
2 replies

Dec 25, 2024 2:48 AM in response to redtomato

You may want to try the following.

  • Open the People album for the person by clicking the tiny icon in the Info. The album may be hidden. Then you should be seeing the command "Add to People & Pets" at the bottom of the album. Click it.
  • If there are now two albums for the same person, merge them by dragging one album on top of theater.
  • If the album has nor been hidden, Photos may have detected the person in the photo and has tentatively assigned the name, but is keeping it secret, until you confirm it. You can do this with the command "Confirm additional photos". This message may appear either on top the album or at the bottom.


Dec 25, 2024 8:40 AM in response to léonie

Hello Léonie,


Thank you for the explanation about Hidden People album. makes sense.

The album isn't hidden.



Using "Review more photos" (This didn't work earlier for some reason, for all People, now it works again)



I did the yes/no thing for a while... (only had to say 'no' because none of the photos offered had Linas in them)



Unfortunately, this didn't do the trick.


Photos must have detected the face somewhere on those photos but doesn't show where.

For example:



Two faces detected. The one on the left is correct. The second is still the same "ghost" (name: Linas)

If I select the first (left) face, the system shows me the face on the photo with a circle. If I select Linas (right), no circle. Linas is the ghost.


Now. I could locate manually the 7 pictures with this "ghost" in it using the People album corresponding to the person "Linas", and hit "This is not Linas". Now the smart album previously created shows 6 pictures instead of seven, as expected.

I'll do it only for one; I'd like to keep the others as examples. I want to find the reason for this.


However, this is a particular case where it's easy to determine the list of ghosts using a smart album (because Linas is shown on pictures taken when he wan't born yet). But impossible to know if there are more ghosts elsewhere in the database...


I would be grateful if I could find all such ghosts in the database.

I noticed this problem by pure accident. Maybe I'm not the only one to have the problem. Maybe it is a bug or a database issue.

Apple's Photos on MacOs: how to remove "ghost" name tags

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.