TL;DR: Really look at people in real life.
I don’t have a strategy yet for names and faces but I got 56 in the Gothenburg Open and I have 76 on memocamp, so I think I might be of some use in this thread.
Statistically (if you disregard the anomalies like von Essen, Reinhard and Konrad) women are better at Names/Faces (and words) than men. My hypothesis is that we’ve been programmed/primed since birth to be caretakers and look at other peoples faces, emotions, personalities more so than men have - thereby creating stronger mirror neurons to recognize ourselves in others and also take note of details in the other person. So my suggestion would be to really look at people (their clothes, their smile, the way they did their hair, the way they hold their drink etc.), mirror their body language and if you really want to go for it - try to see who they really are. This is of more use than you can imagine in real life and in competition (I think) than to create a database of random images of faces and names.
I’m not saying you should try to figure out who people “really are” during competition but it’ll help your face recognition and imagining your images together with their faces better. As for the names in themselves… I’d say go for creating images for the most common Anglo-Saxon, Middle-Eastern and Chinese first names. Chinese names in competition usually consist of multiple shorter names. Zhenzhu was a first name in South Germany which is easy if you have an image for Zhen and Zhu respectively. For European names it is best to get used to the endings of the last names like “-miglia, -tierri” for Italian names, “-strom, -berg, -son, -gren” in Swedish, “-pova” and the likes for Russian. We’re all pretty doomed if a Thai name comes up since 82% of Thai last names are unique because everyone tried to make their last names longer and thus “fancier” until renaming to long names was banned by law. The only work-around for this is to understand that Thai names also consist of smaller names. Panatchanok is easier if you see that it’s based on pan a tcha nok. Super tip - start painting/drawing portraits and also learn to place people on the world map (if you have one naturally in your mind’s eye, otherwise it might be a hassle).
Personally, it all goes horribly when I try to create images for the names (I tried to memorize all 100 names in Tokyo with this and I only got 43 during recall because I had no idea which elderly lady was kayaking etc.). But I’ve been experimenting (with extremely mixed results) to just put peoples initials on their foreheads and then hope during recall that I’ll remember what I read. Like “LT” on your forehead would be a “key” to open up the “box” that holds the name Lance Tschirhart. This only works because I trust myself with not misspelling for the most part. Sometimes I only get +40 with this and sometimes I get +70 (which is what I average right now) so it requires a bit more experimentation until I know whether to ditch it or not.
Hope at least some of my advice helps 