How can I show all unnamed faces in macOS Photos?

I'm trying to show all photos with unnamed faces so that I can annotate them with the correct name.

unnamed face

unnamed

I found an an online solution but it requires you to mark all the pictures with no faces at all.

How can I create a smart album containing all photos with unnamed faces, or otherwise collect all of the unnamed people photos?


For Catalina, this method works (at least from what I can tell):

  • Person is not %
  • Person is blank (i.e., the field is literally blank)

It's possible that just the second condition is all that is needed.

Here is what it looks like:

enter image description here


On MacOS Big Sur, create a smart album with the condition:

Person IS [blank]

person is blank


Edit: After re-reading your question and the provided link I see that my answer is similar but does not entirely solve your problem. From my experience with Photos.app and Lightroom this is probably the best way to approach it if the desired album (i.e. unnamed people) and features don't exist natively.


One option is to create a Smart Album via File > New Smart Album and apply the necessary criteria to filter out existing people.

Specific exclusions

If you have a small number of people you can choose [Person] | [does not include] and add full or partial names to exclude from the Album.

Note that you may need multiple "conditions" (i.e. lines of criteria) to filter out everyone as you can't use wildcards, comma separated names, etc. This also may not be practical if you have large numbers of people in Photos.

Bulk exclusions (this is what you want)

As a catch all approach you can exclude a set of letters that would cover most names such as a,e,i,o,u as at least one of those letters is present in most names. Make sure to select "All" in the "Match [___] of the following conditions" line. This works because it will do partial matches to including the letter o will match (and exclude) names like John, Bob, Thomas, etc.

If / when you find photos containing people that were not caught by this catch all you can determine which letter(s) are missing and add them to the rule.

enter image description here