Photos and Facial Recognition Stuck

[Ledgem]

Hi all,

I've search and searched on this topic and can't find a great answer. Hoping someone here might have it.

Apple Photos scans your photos for faces and attempts to identify them, matching them to people you've set up. We had this back on Aperture and it's a pretty nice feature - just another way to quickly find the photo you're looking for. But the trouble is, mine is stuck. I don't know exactly when it happened, but I think it was some time around when I upgraded to Big Sur, or perhaps a time when my Drobo gave me some issues (the dreaded disconnecting without properly being ejected - happened quite a few times before I retired the device). The number of photos that Photos says it has remaining to scan only increases as I add more photos (which happens once or twice a month); the number never goes down.

My current photo library is quite large, currently measuring at 1.3 TB and containing a mix of photos and videos (but mostly photos). I've had the library on an external SSD for a few months now, and have tried repairing the library, but I cannot get the facial recognition to kick in and start working. It tells me it has about 100,900 photos to go, and that a lovely zero of them have been scanned. I usually do additional identification to tune the accuracy for fun, but this backlog has me dreading it.

Usually when I read about this online the consensus is just that it takes a long time and you have to let it do its thing. I'm doing this on an iMac that is running 24/7, and Photos only runs for a few minutes each day. Up until now I've sort of been hoping that OS point-release updates would do something to kick-start it, and I'm now hoping that the next major OS release fixes it, but I'm getting tired of waiting and could have used the feature on my new photos a few times already. Short of exporting and re-importing everything, has anyone come across something similar, and do you have something to try?

I appreciate your time and thoughts!

 

[0128672]

I'm not sure this is going to help, but here's a couple of thoughts. Keep in mind the process scans your videos too; that takes a long time in itself as you might imagine.

It might be good to find out if photoanalysisd is running, which you can check using the Console.app (Applications > Utilities > Console). Type the word "photos" (without quotes) in the search bar to see if that process appears. I'm no Console expert though so maybe others will chime in with details about what to do if you don't see it.

You can also check for it in the Activity app. If you double click on it, does the detail show any Recent Hangs?

The process only runs when Photos is not open (and your Mac is plugged in, but not a concern for your iMac), but you said you only have it open a few minutes a day.

 

[Ledgem]

I appreciate the thought. I do see it running; it has 3 threads, is taking up a measly 56 MB, and is not using any CPU now (or for the past few minutes), but the CPU time is fairly extensive - almost as long as the system has been running. I tried to see if maybe it's getting stuck on a file but when I sample the process and monitor for it in the Console I don't see anything like that. It seems to be accessing the Calendar (which is a bit weird) and my Contacts (not necessarily unexpected). I'll try to run through my Contacts to see if maybe someone's contact card is faulty, but it doesn't look promising so far...

 

[ltb7]

any update to this?

running IOS 15.4.1 on iPhone, stuck at 10K photos left to still be scanned out of 50K
+
Macbook M1 with latest updates, stuck at 15K left out of 50K to be scanned

all my photos are there and sync fine so it could be worse but can't get scan to finish + tried Activity Monitor, turning off sleep, mac + phone plugged in, naming more photos and pretty much anything could find posted and it's been stuck for months

phone backs up fine to iCloud

 

[Ledgem]

No update but the problem seems to be resolved. Since the original post I've moved my Photos library, and went through an operating system update. I checked just now since you asked, and somewhere along the way it began to move again. Sorry that's not much help...