How to disable face detection in Photos for OS X

I don't like the feature that automatically detects faces in Photos for OS X because of the unnecessary CPU and disk space consumption. A photo library of 360 MB generated 50 MB of face detection data inside the Photos Library.

Is there any way to disable this feature in Photos for OS X?

Solution 1:

Unfortunately, you can only side-step the issue by clicking the Albums tab > Faces, and select each found face & delete it. You cannot bulk select, so this must be done manually for each face.

You should log an enhancement request (or three) at the Photos Feedback page.

Solution 2:

Apparently you can stop face recognition by quitting iPhotos, opening a terminal and typing the following (and press enter):

defaults write com.apple.iPhoto PKFaceDetectionEnabled 0

I guess you'll then need to manually delete all the faces it's recognised thus far.

As for the new "Photos" app, I don't think you can disable the face detection.