Faces data isn't appearing in the Photos app

[boston04and07]

Hi everyone - I just came across a big issue with Photos this morning and it's making me a little nervous. For some reason I'm unable to use my existing Faces tags in Photos. I have hundreds of faces tagged in thousands of photos, and have never had an issue before. When I go to the Faces album, nothing shows up - it's completely empty. However, when I search for a face in the search bar, the data is still there, since when I search for a particular name, it'll show the correct amount of tagged photos. Additionally, when I want to tag a new photo of a person who's already been tagged, I can't, as their existing tag doesn't show up when I start typing in their name.

I've spent so much time getting my faces and tags all organized, so this is really making me concerned. I haven't done anything that I think could cause this. I'm running the latest version of El Capitan and would love any advice you guys have...

 

[boston04and07]

I think I've found the answer to my problem. Unbeknownst to me, in El Capitan, Faces data does back up to and sync in the cloud, but Faces albums do not. Therefore, when you restore photos from an iCloud backup, or sync them to a new Mac, the albums themselves aren't recreated, even though the Faces data itself does stay with your photos. In other words, you can search for a Face and call up all the photos tagged with that face in the search bar, but you can't view all your Faces albums in the Albums tab. Apparently, this is going to be changed/fixed in Sierra. If anyone else ever has this issue in the future, I'd check out this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...s-sierra-photos-update.1978875/#post-23039819