Messages lost its photo index

[Morac]

Last night I was going through the Messages app on my iPhone, iPad and Macbook Air (M1) and found that even though iCloud syncing was enabled, there were several threads that showed up on some devices, but not others. I determined these were threads I had deleted, but somehow the delete didn’t sync up. I deleted the extra message threads and forced an iCloud sync on all 3 devices for good measure.

It was after that that I noticed all the Photos were missing from Search on my Mac and a message showed up that more results would appear after indexing was complete. The Mac had finished indexing years ago, including all the photos, so I don’t know why it suddenly needed to index. In a couple of minutes a few photos showed up in search, so I let it sit plugged in over night.

This morning I checked and nothing changed. It hadn’t indexed any more photos and still showed the indexing message. I am able to search for text in old messages and new ones that arrive and I even see photos when I click on the “I“ in message threads that aren’t in search.

I checked the Messages search cache folder and I see a bunch of photos in there that aren’t showing in the messages search, but no new files new since last night.

At this point though it seems to just not be indexing. Any ideas?

 

[Morac]

I rebooted and plugged it in again and it now no longer says it’s indexing, but there’s only a handful of photos in the search. I think 1 more showed up. There’s 9 now instead of the dozens or hundreds there should be.

 

[Morac]

So this is very odd. If I click search I can still only see those 9 photos with no option to show more. If I search for “photo” I see a photo option which if I choose I can see all the photos.

Basically the photos are there and indexed, but the Messages app just won’t show them in the main search screen.