Oddbean

The new “pet detection” feature in Photos on macOS is doing some weird stuff. It put photos of my dog into two different collections in the “People and Pets” section. When it does this with people, I can drag one collection onto the other to merge them. But with these two collections of my pet, it doesn’t allow the merge. The drag target doesn’t even “activate” (a slight grow animation) to indicate that it can accept the drop. As usual, no error message or explanation in the app.

I eventually just decided to give a name to the second collection. My dog’s name is Daisy Mae. The name I gave to the second collection will make sense once you see the “face circles” in that collection. I have no idea what Photos thinks it’s doing, or why it won’t let me “fix” this problem by merging the collections. Just look at this mess… https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/182/720/576/435/852/original/4b7a9011d81218d6.png https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/182/722/313/291/493/original/670d5413fdc1d498.png https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/182/721/326/565/045/original/6bd11299acb1c9f3.png

@a6ff0b2b I know it doesn’t help with your black box situation, but I’ve been amazed at how well the pet detection has worked on my collection. I have no idea how it knows these are the same dog. https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/182/802/125/976/996/original/da16610ed1c8a09c.jpeg https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/182/801/625/588/429/original/db3dc4b7a1ca02e9.jpeg

@a6ff0b2b this also happened to me. You can’t merge them because one of them is categorized as a person and the other as a pet. You can tell this on iOS when you tap on the Select button and then tap on each one individually. You’ll see it says “1 Pet Selected” and “1 Person Selected.” On Mac, you can right-click and see that it says person or pet in the dialog to Favorite the selection. (1/2)

@a6ff0b2b I simply renamed duplicate pets on iOS and it merged them. Unrelated: Daisy looks so much like my horrible old dog, Mike. https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/182/888/605/856/135/original/395edb7105e265f8.jpeg