People resolve across your personal library and timeline-enabled Shared Spaces, so the same person appears once wherever Gallery can safely prove it is the same identity.
Shared Spaces made group libraries useful. People still fragmented across the boundaries: the same real person might exist in your private library, a family Space and a trip Space as three separate rows. Global People adds the identity layer that connects those scoped profiles, when the viewer has access to the evidence.
On the surface it is simple. Your People page shows one row per person across your own photos and timeline-enabled Spaces, while underneath the profiles stay scoped to their owners and spaces.
Built around permission boundaries
The identity graph is internal. Public APIs do not expose raw identity IDs, and every count, thumbnail, name, birthday, search result and filter suggestion is projected through the assets and Spaces the current viewer can already access.
If someone belongs to Space A but not Space B, Global People gives them no way to infer that a matching person exists in Space B. Metadata sharing governs the rest. Shared names and birth dates reach the space profile only when it allows them.
Search and filters use the same identity model
Person suggestions in global filters and person rows in Cmd/Ctrl+K dedupe through the same accessible identity resolver. Pick a person once. You get the matching photos across your private library and every visible Space.
Single-Space views stay scoped to that Space. Global views widen out to the timeline you have chosen to include.
Merges stay in sync across your whole library
Merges now propagate across scopes. Decide that Gallery's "Person A" and "Person B" are the same real person and the decision travels: a merge in your personal library carries into every timeline-enabled Space where both profiles appear, and a merge inside a Space carries back into your personal library.
Pick the exact face
Personal people and Space people can now take an exact representative face. You pick the crop. Before, you chose a whole photo and hoped the right face was inferred. A Space person can also keep a space-specific override when the inherited personal thumbnail is not the best view.
Face statistics are optional. Admins can enable face totals and lazy detail panels to see how many detected faces are assigned, hidden, visible or still unassigned, which is what you want during an import or a recognition reset.
Large Spaces get safer background work
Identity backfills, shared-space recognition fanout, metadata inheritance and stale-link repair run as durable, targeted jobs. Nothing blocks the foreground People UI. Gallery can repair identities after access changes, linked-library imports or recognition resets without flooding one large Space with unbounded work.
