How many times is OneDrive going to ask me to identify people in my photos?!

As a long-time OneDrive user (and I do try to really use all the features), I can’t help but be mildly annoyed that OneDrive is asking me to identify faces that it has recognized in my photo collection. It’s a neat feature to be sure, but over the years, I’ve gone through this process at least a half dozen times…on the web UI, in the Photos app, etc. And today, when I opened the OneDrive app on my phone for the first time in a while, it asked me to do it yet again. And to be clear, it’s not like the service is asking me to further clarify some new faces it has recognized or new photos that I’ve added since the last round. It’s like OneDrive has completely forgotten I’ve ever done this before. So, of course, I went through it all…again, and the process has improved somewhat since my last experience with it. That said, it still doesn’t do a great job of recognizing and consolidating all photos of a given person…I had to keep telling it that these additional pictures are still my son, my other son, my daughter, my other daughter, my wife, etc., which created a bunch of duplicate people And while all those silos can be merged into the same person, only one pair of duplicates can be consolidated at a time, so that takes a bit of effort. And they make a pretty big deal of the fact that it is permanent, which means, y’know…even more clicks.

Contrast all this with Google Photos (where I also back up everything and just works better with all my Google Home stuff), which required very little direction to get it all working and has just continued working flawlessly ever since. To the point that I can say, hey Google, show me pictures of so and so at the Fourth of July parade with the dog, and lo and behold, it finds just the right ones. It’s pretty excellent.

I’m done now, but I get the feeling that it’s only a matter of time until they change something under the hood and wipe it all out again. Microsoft really is my Ike Turner.