People Album not finishing scan, what gives?

[Benz63amg]

I got my 13 pro on Friday and my iPhone has been connected to the wall outlet many times but the “people album” still haven’t finished scanning my photo library to detect faces, what gives?

When I go to the people faces album in the photos app it says connect iPhone to power to continue scanning faces in the photo library

 

[eas]

Same issue. Mine stalled multiple times but finally scanned 40K of my photos, but is now stuck on the remaining 2043. I've been looking at the iOS logs and it seems to spend a lot of time running com.apple.corespotlight.knowledge. And by a lot, I mean hours at a time while plugged in and locked.

It does occasionally run com.apple.mediaanalysisd.photos.face which keeps mentioning trying 2043 (there is that number again) failed items.

 

[cynics]

How many photos do you have? I have 4000 ish and it felt like a very long time, however I know there are people here with 10x that easy, so I would imagine 10x as long easy. I've noticed not all photos are as easy to process either. Feels like it just hangs at some. I couldn't tell if they were my RAW images or what. Maybe its crowds of people, hard to tell TBH.

Does the iPhone truly sleep when streaming data to the Console? Serious question because I don't know but I would keep it plugged into a normal charger on wifi for as long as possible.

Honestly when it was done I was impressed with how many additional photos its found. I felt the old way was pretty decent but now its grabbing photos of people for a side profile regularly.

corespotlight.knowledge sounds like a duet scheduling process (dasd). And this is just a guess but its likely something similar if not identical as knowledgeC.db used for usage and habit collection for Siri Suggestions/spotlight/etc again though just a guess though.

 

[Benz63amg]

How many photos do you have? I have 4000 ish and it felt like a very long time, however I know there are people here with 10x that easy, so I would imagine 10x as long easy. I've noticed not all photos are as easy to process either. Feels like it just hangs at some. I couldn't tell if they were my RAW images or what. Maybe its crowds of people, hard to tell TBH.

Does the iPhone truly sleep when streaming data to the Console? Serious question because I don't know but I would keep it plugged into a normal charger on wifi for as long as possible.

Honestly when it was done I was impressed with how many additional photos its found. I felt the old way was pretty decent but now its grabbing photos of people for a side profile regularly.

corespotlight.knowledge sounds like a duet scheduling process (dasd). And this is just a guess but its likely something similar if not identical as knowledgeC.db used for usage and habit collection for Siri Suggestions/spotlight/etc again though just a guess though.

I only have about 400 photos synced from my Mac.. and face scan still not complete for close to a week

 

[eas]

Does the iPhone truly sleep when streaming data to the Console? Serious question because I don't know but I would keep it plugged into a normal charger on wifi for as long as possible.
[...]

corespotlight.knowledge sounds like a duet scheduling process (dasd). And this is just a guess but its likely something similar if not identical as knowledgeC.db used for usage and habit collection for Siri Suggestions/spotlight/etc again though just a guess though.

I don't know if the phone truly sleeps while streaming data to the Console, but it definitely runs stuff that it kills or puts to sleep when the phone is unlocked. In any case, I haven't been streaming to the console constantly. For one thing I'm not streaming to the console while it charges over night.

I wondered if it was related to knowledgeC.db. I think it's more likely that it is related to Siri Knowledge. Whatever it is, its doing a lot of work.

Apple collected some diagnostic information last week, after there'd been no progress for at least a week. I notice today that It's still saying it is 2,043 photos to scan. We'll see if 15.0.2 makes any difference.

 

[KittyKatta]

So what exactly are the rules on syncing confirmed faces?

I have photos sync’d between iCloud Storage, MacBook, iPhone and iPad. While it seems to sync the names of the People, it doesn’t actually sync the photos across devices? For example, for a family member identified in 3000 photos on Mac, 1000 on iPad and 200 on iPhone. So is this correct that confirming faces on one device will not actually label them on every other device? (I really hope this isn’t yet another missing feature that is excused because of “privacy”)

 

[jha]

I set mine up as new and it has been stuck here since I got my 13 Pro on launch day.

 

[christian.terra]

I have over 3k photos and it's been stuck on scanning a remaining 400 or so - i tried everything so I just gave up. Hopefully it gets fixed via software update.

 

[KeeganGoerz]

I am having the same issue. Got an iPhone 13 Pro Max. Admittedly I have nearly 20k photos, however though it always takes time to process it does always complete. This time it’s frozen.
I had it plugged in on the first day and it completed 12k photos in a couple hours. It’s been stuck now with 8K photos remaining for days. Kept it plugged in and locked most days, all day. Nothing has changed.
I have tried downloading the library for offline. Turned on and off shared albums. Restarted the phone. Nothing seems to do it.
Also I’m running 15.0.2.

 

[lazyjj1]

Anyone find a solution or a way to find the potentially corrupt files?

 

[Benz63amg]

i solved this issue by MANUALLY telling my iphone who some of the common faces in my photo library are by going to the photos in my library and labeling family members under the faces section and then somehow this process finished scanning otherwise it was simply stuck to no avail ever since i got my 13 Pro for weeks.

 

[Jadeviper]

Same issue with an iPhone 7 and 5300 photos that was sync from iTunes. I also wound up manually identifying people. I waited several days with the phone connected to power and after identifying about 3000 pictures in about 4 hours it just stopped

yet an iPhone 13 Pro with a sync of 42,000+ finished identifying people in one day. The 5300 were a subset of the 42k

The iPhone 13 Pro was running 15.0.1 and the iPhone 7 was running 15.0.2

 

[mbawkher]

Like others have said this feature is glitched.

I'm glad I'm not alone here, I'm only seeing my phone detect me in my People album, even though there are over 7K photos with friends and family on the phone.

On iOS 14, faces were detected automatically without me having to manually detect people to populate the 'People Album'.

 

[eas]

15.1 seems to have helped the issue. It's processed about 1500 of the 2K that it was stuck on.

Progress seems to be fitful. It's at least in part due to the fact that there is still a massive amount of processing that gets done when the phone is powered and locked -- I think the face scanning doesn't get a turn very often.

There are some log messages though that makes me thing that there are still photos it can't/won't manage to process.

I did go in for the first time and confirmed some more faces that it suggested for people it has already tagged. Maybe that'll also give it more to work with.

 

[xerxers]

15.1 seems to have helped the issue. It's processed about 1500 of the 2K that it was stuck on.

Progress seems to be fitful. It's at least in part due to the fact that there is still a massive amount of processing that gets done when the phone is powered and locked -- I think the face scanning doesn't get a turn very often.

There are some log messages though that makes me thing that there are still photos it can't/won't manage to process.

I did go in for the first time and confirmed some more faces that it suggested for people it has already tagged. Maybe that'll also give it more to work with.

can you please tell me how uou go about initiating a face scan. iphone 11 MP. TYIA

 

[KeeganGoerz]

The part that seems interesting to me is that the number of images scanned seems to keep climbing, but the number of images remaining appears to be stuck at the same number. I've begun to wonder if those "remaining photos" are corrupted in some way, and the images being scanned are just new shots I've taken.

 

[Firnomir]

Does anyone have an idea how to fix it? My iPhone went through over 14 000 photos overnight, but it seems to be stuck on 455 left for quite a while now.

 

[KeeganGoerz]

Does anyone have an idea how to fix it? My iPhone went through over 14 000 photos overnight, but it seems to be stuck on 455 left for quite a while now.

Same experience as you. I’m now stuck at 2000 photos remaining. Down from 4000 which it had been stuck on for a month… then one night it did 2000 lol. No idea when it does and does not work. I wonder if the 14.2 update works on this?

 

[dc-mjd]

I have multiple devices. I got a new laptop and it started through the "scanning" process. Unfortunately in the meantime, face names are disappearing from my other devices. Since it has been more than a week and it is still scanning I have no idea if Facebook names will come back or I will have to reenter them. And what will happen when I add/change devices in the future? Previously this has worked perfectly and the photo app was my favorite app on the Mac. I can't find anything quite like it that can sync photos, including their changes, across the devices. Google just doesn't offer the same editing capabilities, especially since it doesn't allow plug ins. Adobe Lightroom appears to do it, but at the cost of $99 a year. I spent an hour on the phone with Apple support yesterday and while they were helpful, the ultimate solution we came up with was to delete the library from the device that appeared to be corrupt (which was not the new device) and start a new photo library. So afternoon one night, I am now at nothing scanned and face names still disappearing from my other devices.

 

[alisex747]

Same issue here. Stuck with 457 remaining photos (25000 already scanned).
Did you solve the problem ?

 

[alisex747]

Issue finally solved for everyone ?

 

[KeeganGoerz]

Issue finally solved for everyone ?

So I think I resolved it finally. After literally months of waiting I decided to try some stuff, and it seems to have worked.

For context, my phone had been saying I had about ~1600 photos left to analyze for literally months now.

First, I installed the iOS 15.2 RC. The first couple hours after that update it seemed to process about 100 more photos (so now saying ~1500 files left to analyze). However then for a week after that day it did not move again, so I figured the RC did not have the fix we are waiting for.

Next, I decided to try turning off, and then back on, iCloud Photo Library. When I did this something strange happened. A number of photos/videos were left locally stored on my iPhone even after iCloud Photo Library was fully off, and the weird part is the number of files left was approximately the same number that my People album had said I had left to analyze (~1500)!

I played around a little with iCloud Photo Library, turning it on and off, and restarting my phone. I also completely logged out of iCloud and back in. Nothing seemed to get rid of these 1500 files.

I thought "I can just manually delete these files since I see they are on my other devices and iCloud.com", however worried that when I turned iCloud Photo Library back on that iCloud would be like "oh I have that file, and I see he deleted it, so I will delete it too". So I tested this by deleting four random screen shots that I didn't care if I lost. Then I turned iCloud Photo Library back on. A few minutes later those screen shots had synced back to my iPhone, suggesting that deleting the remaining files would not impact the "truth" that iCloud holds.

So I turned iCloud Photo Library back off. My phone got back to having approximately 1500 files remaining with iCloud turned off. To be absolutely certain I had no data loss, I connected my iPhone to my Mac and used Image Capture to import these files to a local folder in Finder on my Mac. Once all these photos were safely stored on my Mac, I manually highlighted all the files remaining in Photos.app on my iPhone, and deleted them. I emptied the trash, and turned off Shared Albums. I waited for everything to get deleted, then I restarted my iPhone.

Once I had zero files left (Photos still reported that it had ~3GB of files stored on my iPhone in the 'iPhone Storage' section of settings... but I don't know where those were so YMMV) I reenabled iCloud Photo Library and Shared Albums. Everything came back, including all the files I had manually deleted. Further, when I checked a couple hours later (gave it time to download everything), the People album no longer said it had photos to analyze!

It is now a day later and it still is not saying it has anything left to analyze. I left my phone overnight on the charger to be certain.

I will report back incase the analyzing bug returns once my iCloud Photo Library has "stabilized", but it seems to be finished downloading everything and the problem has not returned.

TL/DR - I had luck fixing this problem by: turning off iCloud Photo Library, manually deleting all the photos that were left stored locally on the iPhone, then reenabling iCloud Photo Library.

 

[KeeganGoerz]

So unfortunately it looks like the bug came back.
My phone has returned to the analyzing faces process, and has ~7000 photos remaining (up from the ~1500 when I started this troubleshooting).
I will report back if the photo library gets stuck again, or if it just chugs through them like it should... however at this minute it looks like I've just gone backwards.
Sorry folks...

 

[alisex747]

Ok thanks for your feedback
What about other users ? Did the scan finally finish ?

 

[lazyjj1]

Not for me, it’s been forever stuck