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! 💜