I’ve been tweeting, and created a Moment, regarding the fact that Photos on macOS Sierra has gotten rid of the “Faces” feature in favor of a new “People” feature. This wipes out all of your hard work tagging people in photos. Personally this means I’ve lost hundreds of hours.

But, you don’t have to. And it should be pretty simple to do.

Before you upgrade to macOS Sierra open Photos and “tag” all of your Faces with a keyword. This way, when you upgrade to Sierra, and prior to going through all the trouble of tagging People again, you can still find your loved ones in photos. This is how you do it, step-by-step:

• Open Photos
• Select Faces
• Select one of your friends or family
• Select all Photos (CMD + A)
• Control+Click on one of the photos, select “Get Info”
• In the “Keywords” area create a unique keyword per person.
• Repeat for all Faces you want to save

So, for me since my name is “Colin Devroe” I’d create a “colindevroe” keyword. Then, when I was on Sierra or iOS (if you’re using iCloud Photo Library) I could simply type “colindevroe” into the search box and I’d still be able to find the thousands of photos I’m found in.

Later, after you’ve gone through Apple’s “People” creating workflow, you’ll be able to search for people’s names again and, optionally, remove those keywords you created.

I hope you’ve read this post before upgrading to Sierra.