iPhone People & Pets 'Review More Photos' not identifying faces

"but “Review More Photos” still immediately finds nothing for anyone."

The Photos.app seems to have named all faces where it is reasonably sure who the person is.

In your case keep naming the faces manually until a system upgrade with an improved face detection or face recognition will force Photos to scan all images again for faces.

You could force a new scan for faces immediately by resetting the face recognition, but that would mean a lot of work.

If you select all People&Pets albums and delete them, Photos should prompt you, if you want to reset the face recognition database: How to Reset the Named People Album in Ph… - Apple Community

Like this in Photos on my Mac with macOS Golden Gate:

But it will take a very long time to scan the library again and you would have to name many faces again.

I have added keywords with the name of the person to all named faces. Then I can search for the keyword, when I need to name faces again. Photos iOS on iOS 27 is now supporting keywords too. Previously we could not assign keywords on an iPhone, only on the Mac.

This can happen, if if Photos has assigned the faces of some still unnamed pets and people to new, different people albums. You have to merge these albums into the existing albums of these people by assigning a name.

To fix this,

• tap the faces thumbnails with the question mark on a photo with no name assigned.
• This will open a menu, where you can select to name the person. Enter the correct name.
• Then open the album of the person or pet and check for photos with faces that do not belong there. The automatic face recognition can break, if Photos accidentally merged the photos of two different people into one album. You have to remove the faces that do not belong there, so Photos can learn again, what a person looks like.

After you have used "Confirm additional faces" it is important to check, if the added faces are correct, particularly, if you see a message like "You confirmed 8 faces. 20 more have been added automatically." It is important to fix errors immediately.

That is why I am thinking the unnamed faces are still hidden, because Photos is assuming incorrectly, that these faces belong to people not yet in in your People&Pets, and the only way to add them to your People&Pets is to name them manually, so they will appear in People & Pets, also to check each album in People & Pets for wrong faces in them. If Photos does not recognize a person, there are either faces of a wrong person in the album or faces of this person have been added to the album of a different person. Then Photos will not be able to recognize the person in new photos because it cannot learn what the person looks like.

I don’t know if this is the problem you’re having, but I just discovered that on my phone, in large group photos, when I pull up to show the info panel, it will show only 4 faces to be named - or so I thought - but the four faces are actually in a small scrollable carousel, and there are often more (unidentified) faces hidden to the right! You just have to scroll them into view.

Hi léonie,

I have already manually assigned faces with question marks to the correct existing people. There are also no more unnamed people listed under “Add People”. I have checked the existing people albums, and all the faces are correctly assigned.

However, when I select “Review More Photos” for myself or anyone else, it immediately says there are no additional photos. There is no visible searching or loading—it feels as though it is not searching at all, even though I can manually find missing photos where our faces are clearly visible.

This happens with every person in my library and has persisted across both my previous iPhone and my current iPhone 17 Pro for several months.

Is there anything else I can try on my iPhone?

Hi léonie,

I understand your explanation, but I have already checked all the People & Pets albums. There are no incorrectly assigned faces, and the missing photos are not in another person’s album.

Manually naming a face successfully adds that photo to the correct person, but “Review More Photos” still immediately finds nothing for anyone.

Hi léonie, I understand your explanation, but I have already checked all the People & Pets albums. There are no incorrectly assigned faces, and the missing photos are not in another person’s album. Manually naming a face successfully adds that photo to the correct person, but “Review More Photos” still immediately finds nothing for anyone.

Same here on iOS 27.2, tapping "Review More Photos" doesn't generate any ideas and just says "There don't appear to be any additional photos of ...", this applies to everyone in my People & Pets Album. Seems like the feature is broken.

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