I really love eggs but I’m trying to steer clear of dairy.
How to Reset People & Pets in iCloud Photos
If you're experiencing persistent issues caused by the People & Pets metadata in iCloud Photos, there is a hidden way to reset it across all devices associated with your account.
The most common reasons you might want to do this:
- You accidentally merged multiple people and can't train your way out of detangling them
- You accidentally removed people and can't get iCloud Photos to recognize them as people again
- The People Collection in the iOS Photo Shuffle lock screen and the updated watchOS 11 Photos watch face configurators is missing someone important, and you hope that by resetting everything, your spouse or kid or whoever will start appearing (this is the issue I've had for a couple years now)
The reset function is not currently available from any settings screen, and is only triggered by selecting and removing all people and pets in a single remove operation. I only tested this on a Mac (under macOS 15.0 Sequoia), but it may also work on iPhone and iPad. Since it will trigger a full re-scan of your photo library, it made the most sense to trigger the reset on a Mac that has the full library downloaded locally.
Steps, in a nutshell:
- Select all the people (not the groups) in the "People & Pets" tab of the Photos
app (you can do this by selecting one and pressing
Command-Aor by clicking the first and then shift-clicking the last) - Press the delete key
- If absolutely every item is selected a special dialog will appear prompting you to "Reset People & Pets Album". Click it, if you dare
- Don't touch anything. Over the next several days while Photos is "finding people", anyone you name or any people you attempt to merge may (will?) disappear entirely
Subsequently, an indeterminate progress bar was displayed for five minutes or so in my case (I have about 160,000 photos and 50,000 videos). Following that, you should see the "Finding People…" status view appear on the People & Pets tab of each of your devices.
Hopefully this fixes whatever ails you! 💜
The Empowered Programmer citations
Update: As promised, the talk is now up! Go check it out if you want.
I meant to be more on top of it than this, but thanks to some day-of turbulence, I failed to do two things before my Rails World talk on Thursday:
- Post this promised post of links to my blog so people could see all the various tools and advice I'd referenced
- Redirect Becky's old site (buildwithbecky.com) to the new one (betterwithbecky.com)
Whoops!
Anyway, better late than never. Here are the things I mentioned in the talk:
- Better with Becky, the new product we just launched
- Test Double the leading Ruby & Rails consultancy I had the privilege of co-founding
- My Active Storage advice
- My podcast, Breaking Change (Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Youtube)
- My free monthly newsletter, Searls of Wisdom
Of course, most of you reading this weren't in the audience in Toronto and haven't seen the talk. Sit tight, I'm told that Rails World's turnaround time for getting the video online won't be too long. 🤞
There are a bunch of other things about the app's design and architecture that I had to cut for time and which I hope to share in the future, as well as a behind-the-scenes look at how I put together the presentation. Stay tuned!
When I wrote this pull quote even I was surprised by how much Standard Ruby has improved in the last two years railsdeveloper.com/survey/2024/#what-code-quality-tools-do-you-use
Had a dream last night that Apple (finally) announced a lightweight 12” MacBook Pro with M4 next month and I was so mad when I woke up and remembered they’ll never actually do this.
Inflation is the top economic issue in this election:
2020 iPhone 12 Pro: $999
2021 iPhone 13 Pro: $999
2022 iPhone 14 Pro: $999
2023 iPhone 15 Pro: $999
2024 IPhone 16 Pro: $999
Last night I won the Flower Cup in Mario Kart—I really put the petal to the medal!
100% agree with DHH on Passkeys. I too was bought-in on adopting them for my apps but realized they pose a customer service nightmare and went back to email login world.hey.com/dhh/passwords-have-problems-but-passkeys-have-more-95285df9
Drive-by Active Storage advice
This post is also available in Japanese, care of Shozo Hatta
I'm working on a conference talk and there won't be time for me to detail each and every piece of advice I've accrued for each technical topic, so I'm going to dump some of them here and link back to them from the slides.
Today's topic is Active Storage, the Ruby on Rails feature that makes it easy to store user-generated assets like photos and videos in the cloud without clogging up your application or database servers.
Before you do anything, read this absolutely stellar post describing how to get the most out of the feature and avoid its most dangerous foot-guns.
Here goes.
TIL about the treasure trove of design assets that Apple shares. Extremely cool. developer.apple.com/design/resources/
There have now been 20 major versions since the initial release of Breaking Change, but this is one of the less bad ones. It was substantially improved by friend of the show, Eric Doggett, who helped out with mixing!
If you have strong feelings about anything you hear, you know where to stuff those feelings (other than "deep, deep down"): podcast@searls.co.
Spicier-than-usual show notes follow:
Did you know that init.d was named that because it was written by an Initial D fan at AT&T?
Something I wish they’d told me as a kid: not only is failure an option, it’s actually super popular.
Extremely interested to know how the Apple Watch Series 10 loses 1.1 grams of weight when you add a cellular modem to it
36.4 grams (aluminum, GPS)
35.3 grams (aluminum, GPS + Cellular)
41.7 grams (titanium)
Five wooden nickels for anyone who can answer this for me stackoverflow.com/questions/78965596/is-it-possible-to-detect-with-css-or-javascript-whether-safari-has-compact-tab
Just reached for my todo_or_die gem for the first time in a while (adding time bombs to remind me to clear out Rails monkeypatches in the future if they’re no longer needed).
Noticed it’s been ported to Rust, JavaScript, Python, and Elixir. Cool! github.com/searls/todo_or_die
Lotta grumbling about Apple’s "Glowtime" teaser tagline to tomorrow’s keynote as being an inapt description of the new Siri interface.
What if the Capture button is translucent, has an LED beneath it and it glows? Remember the breathing iBook/PowerBook LED? Maybe it lights up with notifications or while operating the camera to indicate some UX state?
Something people misunderstand about "ball hogs" is that they assume they hog the ball because they’re better than other players.
It's the opposite! Ball hog is a personality type (and I am one of them). I want to be in control as much as possible, and as a result I spend time getting really good at what I do. Almost all of my own skill acquisition can be explained by this impulse.
How do people write prose in code editors, with vim movements, and insist on softwrap? Drives me up a fucking wall not being able to navigate up and down reliably with j and k. #TeamHardWrap80cs
TIL that Amazon’s shortened links (and all affiliate links) are CASE SENSITIVE. Any web app that normalizes urls by transforming them to lower-case will break Amazon affiliate links and I finally understand why they don’t work on half the web.
God dammit all to hell.