Photos keep untagging one person

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Level 1

4 points

Photos keep untagging one person

For at least a year, Photos keeps removing the face tags for my son. It's a problem specific to photos of him. I have thousands of pictures of him over the years and I keep going through and manually retagging them as him, only to have the tag removed a few days later.

I tried contacting Apple support but they only advice they were able to offer was force restart, upgrade to latest iOS which didn't do any good.

I tried reseting faces and memories at one point as that had been suggested in another forum but that didn't help either.

Anyone have any good solutions?

Posted on Sep 24, 2025 7:07 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

200,525 points

Sep 25, 2025 4:40 AM in response to GWeathrall

Are you asking about Photos for Mac or Photos for iPhone or iPad?

If Photos is continually removing the face tags for a specific person, this person may have become merged with a different person, because they are looking similar. Check, if you can find photos of your son in the album of a different pet or person.

To fix this, you need to reject the face names for both persons, that have become merged into one person. You may want to collect all photos where you are rejecting the name in an album, so you can find them again later to assign the names again.

Then name them again, but use different names from new, different contacts. Create new contact entries for both people with a slightly different name - only temporarily, until Photos has learned to keep the two people apart. Once the face of your son is back to the People&Pets album and does not vanish again, you can change the name back to the original contact card. But make a backup, before you do this.

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