Cannot add maiden name to my Photo name in Photos on MacBook.

What name do you have on your own contact card. If it's not your maiden name change it to it.

Then try adding your name to a new photo of yourself.

Then go to the People section and see if your newly named photo is there. If it is drag the People icon of your old name onto the icon with your new name to merge the old into the new.

Degen,

Photos for Mac is using the name format settings we have specified in the Contacts.app.

Have you checked the Settings > General?

Most important is Contacts > Settings > General > Shortname Format. Photos tends to shorten the name to the Short name. Sometimes it will show just the first name instead of the full name. I have set the Short Name format to the Full name. And the Last Name is shown before the First Name, so I can sort the Contacts by the Last name.

And the names in Photos are now also in the format Last name, first name.

But, by all means use the Contact Sheet to save the full names.

On a Mac we are not forced to use the name suggestions from the Contacts. we can assign names that are not in our contacts. Most of the people in my People&Pets album are not in my Contacts at all, people who are no longer alive or people I have met only once in my life.

You could assign names starting with a prefix "FT:" for Family Tree, like "FT: Scott Santa Clause Calvin". Names, that do not correspond to a Contact will not be modified by Photos, but will also prevent Siri from analyzing the names and making sharing suggestions.

Here's the thing-- Face recognition tags are pretty volatile, they're not at all standardized, and you don't know that they'll even survive the next OS transition. We shouldn't depend on them for anything really important. You need to include names as keywords. Keywords are standard, and they transfer with the metadata in the pictures. Just select all in a Person Album and add the name keyword to all of them at once. And don't worry about full names. I use Richard for me, and Richard C for an uncle, and so on. Short names are really better in pictures.

Full names can go in the Caption field where there's room for long names. For relatives, I put in the full name with birth and death dates. I'll even say Richard's Father's Mother, or something like that. With option-return, you can start a new line, though this doesn't always translate to other media. The cool thing here is that, while iPhones and iPads don't do Keywords or Titles, and face names are really flaky, they do show the captions.

Furthermore, you can print (or save as a pdf file) a Contact Sheet that has the captions on it, like this:

Then you can send them to relatives and ask for input.

What do you think?

Thanks! The contact sheet is one of the great under-discovered gems of Photos!

Captions are a bit of a pain, because there's so little room in the Info Window. But you can type information in Notes or someplace, and then copy and paste. I also use the Caption to include any comments someone has written on the back or on the bottom of the picture, like "On the Back: This is Aunt Ruby at the Family Reunion"

Searches in captions work pretty well in Photos on the Mac. If I type "(1862-1929)" into the search field, I get pictures of my wife's great grandfather, because I put his birth-death dates in the caption. If I double click to expand his picture and then scroll down to the "Explore" section, it shows me a link to his Person Album, and I can see all the other pictures of Grandpa Virgil.

By the way, adding name tags manually puts people into their Person Album along with the Photos-recognized pictures. But manually added names don't help in future IDs. Labeling the back of my wife's head puts that picture in her album, but it doesn't make all the backs of all the heads ID as her.

Face tags are especially useful in those pictures of bunches of people you can't remember.

Just a list of names isn't good enough--I know because that's part of what I had to use to identify these folks. For some old pictures like this, I made a screenshot to preserve the names with the faces and, except for the babies like my mother, it works as a good reference when I find other pictures.

Here's some other ways to identify your photos;

1 - Adding keyword to existing Photos: if you have in the People view some groups of family/friends click on one, In the next window click on the "Show More" link. Then select one of the photos and type ⌘+A (select all). Now bring up your keyword pane (⌘+K) and add the keyword for that person to all of them. Do that for each person in the Person section. You might want to add the keywords for the family and friends ahead of time.

2 - Adding capture day & brief description and a sequential padded number to the Title of a group of selected and sorted photos: download this Apple Script into the script editor and save it as an application: Batch Change Title to Capture Date-Description-Padded Sequential Numbers

. Make sure the Title field for the photos selected is empty. You can run this Apple Script as an app on the selected apps to clear the Title field: Script: Batch clear the Title of selected items. Do the same to this script as you did to the Capture Date script, i.e. save as an app. To run either script select the photos to be processed and click on the script app to launch. The can be either in the Dock or have aliases of them on the Desktop where you can easily read them.

When you need the photos outside of the library you can export them with the Title as the new file name. Then the info goes with the photo.

The naming script works like this:

I had a trunk of family albums and loose pictures that sat in my garage for about 15 years with me avoiding the thought of going through them. My wife had another chest full of pictures. With people who know who these people were dying off, I figured I ought to get on it.

Richard.Taylor wrote:

I had a trunk of family albums and loose pictures that sat in my garage for about 15 years with me avoiding the thought of going through them. My wife had another chest full of pictures. With people who know who these people were dying off, I figured I ought to get on it.

We didn't get around to selling our parents' house until COVID. It was another six months before we could go pick up the personal things we wanted to keep. After a day and a half of looking at boxes of photos, I gave up. As it is, I have multiple large plastic bins. And really, there's no one left but me and the youngest of my three brothers. Sometimes my oldest brother's widow knows some things. So, yeah, I've been putting it off.

When I retired in the late 90's I spent the better part of 2 years digitizing 5000+ slides and 5000+ loose photos with two scanners, a flat bed scanner for photos and a slide scanner.

Needless to say I warmly welcomed the digital camera era.

Old Toad wrote: … digitizing … slides and … loose photos

I'm still at it. I didn't mention the closet so stuffed with photos that I'm afraid to open the door!

The conundrum is what do do with them after scanning. The really old pictures seem like family heirlooms, so I feel obligated to keep them. They're in ziplock bags with desiccants to hopefully keep them from rotting. Slides don't take up much room, but what good are they? The slide projector is long dead. I think I'm throwing the Photomat-like prints away-- I hope I don't regret it.

deege wrote: Richard, what exactly is a contact sheet? Is it something you created in Pages? Or something within Photos?

Oh-- good one!

When we developed pictures, like real film, they were negatives so you couldn't really tell which were the good ones. So we'd lay the strips of negatives on a piece of photo paper (all in the dark room, of course) and briefly turn a light on to expose the paper-- so we'd get a sheet filled with little pictures the same size as the negatives that were made by having the film in contact with the paper. It was called a contact sheet. We'd examine that to choose which pictures to print for real.

So now, a contact sheet just means a bunch of little pictures on a page.

Oops-- last part of your question:

In Photos, contact sheet is a choice with the Print command:

You can choose different things to include:

You can print any of the stuff that's in the Info Window under the picture.

When you print pretty much anything with a Mac, one choice you have is to print to PDF

So you can make a pdf file with lots of pictures and captions without using paper!

I agree, this is also great information. I haven't captured a lot of my family photos, but the ones I have, I'm definitely going to do this with.