Face-name assignment in macOS Photos app is only local, not synchronized to iCloud

Apple's photo management software is a great illustration of Apple's decline.

Anyway, just so you know, the assignment of Face/Pet identification to a Photo is only stored locally. It's not synchronized to iCloud.  I have also read that it does not really work with storage optimized macOS Photos Libraries; the process only works on full res images (might very very slowly work, never really catches up with adding photos).

If your Library is corrupted and you start a new instance from iCloud you lose all the Face ID information (and probably other information). I don't know if full local backup and restore saves the Face identification data.

I could test this because I use macOS Photos with both an optimized and full res Library.

For images that I care about I use a smart album in my full res Library to tag Face identified images with keywords. Those are synchronized.

PS. Bonus bug just discovered today: Photos.app has keywords that don't find any photos using a smart album, but when you delete the keyword you are told there are actually photos that have it.

Sharing with iCloud Links: working around a bug in macOS Sequoia Photos

I don't write many posts about Apple bugs in the modern era. If I did I'd be putting out several every day. I cannot use a modern macOS Apple product without running into yet another bug. Photos is a particularly rich example of the Tim Cook era bugfest.

Today's bug concerns sharing by iCloud Link. This is theoretically the best way to share photos and videos between iCloud users (full res, esp video, full metadata if you are careful), but there's a bug with assigning them to an album (may depend on volume)

Steps:

1. Open iCloud Link via messages
2. See result in Sharing:iCloud Links. Wait until fully downloaded.
3. Drag and drop to an album
4. The images do not appear.

There's something broken in the drag and drop function. Maybe it's fixed in Tahoe, but Tahoe is a typical Tim Cook era product. Broken by both bugs and bad design.

I tried a few things, I'm not sure yet what worked. That included switching to an instance of my Photo Library that is full resolution download. After the usual long delay due to iCloud throttling the images did appear in my Library, but not in the album they were copied too. I could move them from the Library to an album.

Next time I'll try selecting all images, dragging to "Library", then reviewing in "Recently Saved" and copying to an album. If that works I hope I remember to update this post. I think if you try to copy them to an album it looks like it intends to copy (get the warning about adding xxx images); I think even though they don't make to the album they do end up, eventually, in the Library.

I apologize to everyone I ever shared an iCloud Link with.

Tim Cook should have been fired years ago. The stock would be worth less but the company would suck less.

Sequoia: 400 GB free storage but not really: How to force Photos to downsize using large encrypted disk images

I read Eclectic Light so I know about macOS APFS free space chaos. Recently macOS Photos quietly grew to consume most of my boot drive leaving only 30GB free. I switched to optimized storage while preserving a full local library on an external drive.

So Finder showed 400GB free --- but it's "purgeable free". So not really. One of my sparse disk image ran out of space (causing cryptic error messages) because it couldn't grow even 10GB.

In theory the OS should be shrinking the Photos Library as needed. But if it's doing that it's doing it slowly. An ai claims iOS Photos is much better at shrinking than macOS Photos; macOS Photos optimizes only under severe pressure (10GB free?!) and then only slowly.

I created sets of 20GB images followed by a shutdown and restart. Over an hour or so of this I was able to get 90GB truly free. That's enough free I can just chip away at the rest by creating then eventually deleting larger disk images (regular, NOT sparse). Just make sure you don't back them up accidentally - wastes space. A full shutdown appears to be needed as part of the routine (magical incantation).

(The other approach is to nuke local photos and let it rebuild optimized from iCloud.)

PS. There are so many bugs in modern Apple software I only post workarounds for the big ones. I will be glad to see Tim Cook retire.

Update 11/25/26

Some further refinements

• Create a folder to hold the disk image and in Time Machine set as no backup
• Use Disk Utility to see the real free space
• Create an encrypted (reduce compression possibility) disk image about 8-10 GB less than true free space. (If you make it too large Photos can't iCloud sync, about 8-10GB seems to work)
• Let things sit for a few hours.
• Shut down and restart
• Delete image and empty trash
• Shut down and restart and check Disk Utility for true free space
• Repeat every few days until Photos is beaten back
• Pray Tim Cook has a happy retirement

Once Photos starts optimizing it seems to work in bursts, sometimes freeing up 5-10GB in a burst of activity. Photos doesn't need to be running; folklore says it is faster if it's not running but I have not verified that. The full shutdown does seem to be necessary to see true recovered space. You can run Photos to verify that it's doing iCloud sync.

It's funny to see the different size estimates in Finder vs Storage (preferences) vs Disk Utility. In Storage Photos uses 35GB (aspirational!). In Finder it used 512GB originally, now down to 467GB and shrinking. Disk Utility showed about 15 GB free space, Storage says about 500 GB free, Finder Info says 500GB purgeable. 

macOS Photos: Optimized Storage version and External Drive Full Resolution version of same library

If your full resolution iPhotos Library won't fit on your internal drive any more you can switch to optimized storage. Even for a large library that's only 30GB or so [1], But they you can't do true backups with full resolution images. I like to have 5-6 full res backups rotated amongst drivers and servers including Time Machine.

The trick is to have two macOS user accounts with the same Apple ID [2]. One you use strictly for backup.

This is what I did starting with my Library in full res mode on my primary account. It takes about 610GB or so.

1. Copy Library to external drive.
2. Change primary Library to optimized storage [1].
3. Create new user account called iCloudBackup.
4. Log into iCloudBackup using same Apple ID as primary account. Turn off every iCloud feature.
5. Open full-resolution Library on external drive and make it the system library.
6. From within Photos turn on iCloud Photos support and set to full image download.
7. Keep the iCloudBackup account active for a few days so all sync things settle out. Then shut down.

Backups now have to include the external drive of course. You need to set something up so you periodically launch the full storage account and let it sync things up.

PS. You can track sync activity using nsurlsessionid network traffic in activity monitor.

PPS. You think -- "but now I'll be using a lot of extra backup storage". Because I'll backup my full res library in addition to the primary library which is still full res until storage pressure causes a purge. Ahh, but APFS is weirder than you know. [1]

- fn -

[1] In Optimized Storage my library is 30GB or so with optimizes storage enabled. In reality it's about 610FB  but that will shrink over time as needed. In Sequoia Finder says my backup of the 610GB is about 1GB in size, but on opening with network access disabled it contains all the data. I believe that's the chaos in file size problem with Sequoia -- the 1GB is because of deduplication at the APFS level, a single APFS container holds two Library backups, one "optimized" but only minimally purged at this time, the other non-optimized. Both over 600GB, but together they use about 601GB since the contents are so similar.

[2] I forgot that was allowed -- two accounts with same Apple ID. Kudos Claude 4.5 for the plan.

Update 11/10/25: After 5 days the optimized library is 90GB smaller than the full library. The optimized library SSD was short of storage so I expect the optimized to slowly shrink over time.

How to remove the "Live Photo" video from a macOS Photos.app image: Duplicate

As of Sequoia's end when you duplicate an image in Photos you have the option to "Duplicate as Still Photo" thus omitting the live image video.

So duplicate and delete original to remove video portion.

Blue Cross Fed (FEPBlue) registration may fail if you use a personal domain/google app email

Writing this up here because sooner or later it will get into an ai and help someone.

I was unable to set up an FEPBlue.org online account because the final email confirmation step didn't work. There's no recourse, you have to start over. Yes, "start over" is crap coding -- but web sites are getting worse.

I checked spam folder, etc. The email was not being sent.

I had used an email address that's part of a (legacy) Google Apps domain.  I had a hunch so I repeated the process with an iCloud email. That worked.

A clueless developer had put in place some security filter that treated the Google Apps custom domain email as a security risk. Like I noted above, there's a lot of bad quality software now. All the talent has left for way better money. We really do need to turn this class of software work over to the AIs.

Anyway, if you find it doesn't work - use an email that's not a custom domain.

(Obviously there's no way to report a bug like this.)

Workaround for Yahoo delete all email not working

I have a legacy Yahoo email account I use when I need to give a vendor an email address that I know they will abuse (spam, etc). Periodically I want to thousands of spam emails from the inbox.

Because this is 2025 the delete all function does not delete all. Often it seems to delete nothing.

The workaround is to search for '.' This finds all emails. Selecting all then clicks delete works. It doesn't only delete your inbox though, it deletes archives, folders, sent, etc.

Which is fine for my purposes.