Merge duplicate pets under People & Pets in the Photos App

Photos may have recognized one of the Pet albums as a person instead of a Pet. Albums you are trying to merge have to be of the same type. In that case you will have to add the photos from one album to the other, individually, as described by Richard.

a nice name, Flurry!

I could not find any documentation, on how Photos is handling the differences between people & pets. But the named pet faces I had added manually, before Photos introduced the pets created a lot of trouble, because I could not merge them with automatically named pets albums.

First-- I have no experience merging pets. Pet IDs have to be really hard for the computer, and I have a certain sympathy for them.

But I just found that I, too, have two albums for the same cat, and they don't merge. So I went to the pictures in the smaller group, and I did "This is not Flurry" and then added the name Flurry. It gave me two choices (for the two Flurry albums,) and I picked the other one. It worked. When I did all the pictures, and then I clicked on the now empty Flurry album, Photos crashed! But, when I re-opened Photos, there was only one Flurry.

Does that work for you?

By the way-- since you have a Mac, you should add keywords for your pets. I select all from the Flurry album, and I add "Flurry" to the keyword list for all of them. There are also pictures of Flurry that don't make it to the Pets album, and so I find those and add her keyword name there, too. People/Pets albums are flaky, at best, so many of us double up with the name in keywords or in captions or in Titles for them.

Keywords, Titles and Captions transfer when you export pictures, but Facial Recognition does not. Keywords, Titles, and Captions are sure to survive OS upgrades, but Facial Recognition may not.

léonie wrote:

Photos may have recognized one of the Pet albums as a person instead of a Pet.

Ahh-- so Flurry#2 was a person! In fact, Flurry#2 still shows (without pic) as a choice. when I manually identify her, but it doesn't not come up when Photos had recognized the face.

I just found that I had two albums from a late Sheltie named Brogan. They would not merge, even though they both seemed to be for the same species. I removed all the names in Brogan A, Photos crashed, and then I renamed the "unnamed" ones--and the only choice I had was Brogan B.

Since all the Brogans had keywords, this was pretty easy to do.