How long does it take to scan for People?

MacInWin · Oct 1, 2018

I have about 8500 pictures in Photos. I noticed it had not discovered the face of a friend, so I found a picture with him, named him and let Photos go find the rest of the pictures with him in it.

It's been a week and Photos is still reporting that it will "continue scant your remaining xxxx photos when you're not using the app and your Mac is connected to power." Today the xxxx is 2,140.

My Mac is always connected to power, I opened Photos and have left it open for that week. Once a day I do shut Photos down and restart to get the count to update, as it does not update the count on the fly apparently. It seems to be scanning about 30 photos a day, which means it will be done in about two months.

How does one speed up this process? Surely it can be faster than it apparently is.

MBP details in my profile, Photos is Version 4.0, macOS is Mojave.

TIA

IWT · Oct 1, 2018

Hi Jake. Sorry about this.

I have close to 17,000 photos and 176 videos in Photos Version 3 (High Sierra).

Just now I opened Photos > Faces > selected one with the name underneath (in my case Rob J).

Then in the Search field, top right, I entered Rob J and hit search. It found all his pictures in about 7 seconds and these went back about 8 years.

So something very wrong with your situation.

Did your search process follow mine? Or did you do it a different way?

I suppose it could be a Mojave glitch???

Of course, in my case I selected a name, already recognised. You may be trying to find Faces that match your friend and maybe there are no exact matches in which case it go into a continuous loop.

Do you have any other, perhaps better, photo of your friend? These things are normally very quick.

I'm not being very helpful - really sorry - but I can't think of other ideas at the moment. Will ask some friends of mine with Macs to see if anything better surfaces.

Ian

MacInWin · Oct 1, 2018

Thanks, Ian. I have no idea of what to do at this point. Today it moved the needle zero, same number scanned at the end of the day as at the start. The image is the best I have of him, straight on, well lit, in focus. I can't see how it would be Mojave causing the problem.

What I did was find the one picture of him that was best, then highlighted his face, named it and let it run. And run, and run...

For the other folks who I have added, I can click on their picture in the faces gallery and the response is immediate. The pictures with them are gathered for me in a quick order (less than a second, it seems). But if I click on the one I added most recently, I get a message saying, "Updating <name> People will finish updating when Photos is in the background."

It's been like that for a week. And I can't find any way to cancel the search for him at this point.

Maybe it's time to contact Apple.

IWT · Oct 2, 2018

What I did was find the one picture of him that was best, then highlighted his face

No chance that altering the original in this way added to the problem?

As to stopping all this - would Force Quit and a reboot sort that?

And yes, maybe a chat with Apple is the way forward.

Ian

MacInWin · Oct 2, 2018

Called Apple. Not much help. Stumped the 1st level guy totally. Everything on my machine is set up properly. He passed me to the 2nd tier, who didn't help much either. Ended up trying Safe Mode (no change) and then another user (Can't see the database, so not much use there). Reset NVRAM, SMC. All the usual things. No change. His final suggestion was "let it run." But yesterday it scanned 1, yes 1, image, so with 2100 to go, it's going to be 7 years at that rate.

At this point I'm at a total loss for what to try next. I suppose I could try the nuclear option of exporting all 8300 images to an external drive, then starting a new Photos database and importing them all from that export. A bit drastic, as that would then trigger a massive sync to iCloud again. And then back down to my iPad from iCloud. That's a lot of bandwidth as the database is about 80 GB. But it COULD fix the problem, I guess.

What to do?

pm-r · Oct 2, 2018

What to do?

Start shredding and pressing apples for cider maybe…???

Actually, that's a bit of a bummer and it just might actually be quicker to do your own manual scan for your friend. Of course, then you would need to have some ready made cider or some wine at your side.

- Patrick
======

MacInWin · Oct 2, 2018

Patrick, given how long it's taking, I could bash several seasons of apples before it finishes!

I can't even cancel the process. There is nothing to allow that. If I remove his face from the People folder, it just keeps saying the same message about needing to scan 2100 pictures.

So I'm going to just ignore it and let it run. If it takes 7 years, that's ok.

pm-r · Oct 3, 2018

I can't even cancel the process. There is nothing to allow that.

Won't a force quit or forced shutdown get it to quit and then restart?

Or does it just start all over again after it's booted?

It must be taking up quite a few Mac resources that you might need for doing other more normal stuff. And is this a new Photos feature in Mohave others can look forward to? :Smirk:

- Patrick
======

MacInWin · Oct 3, 2018

No, stopping Photos doesn't require a force quit, just a regular quit, and when it restarts, it shows the exact same situation. And Photos is taking maybe 0.1% of the CPU in Activity Monitor. so it is neither running away nor stopped. Just moving vvvvveeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyy sssssslllllllooooooowwwwwwwllllllyyyyyy.

badshoehabit · Oct 3, 2018

What about restoring photos from an earlier back up? That should cancel any recent instructions.

IWT · Oct 3, 2018

badshoehabit said:
What about restoring photos from an earlier back up? That should cancel any recent instructions.

Now that is a much more intelligent suggestion than any of mine.

Should have thought of that:Blushing:

Ian

badshoehabit · Oct 3, 2018

LOL - Other than 'force quit and reboot' and the cider, I didn't understand much of any previous answer!

MacInWin · Oct 3, 2018

I posted in the other thread:

I could do that, but the question remains, What will Photos and iCloud and iPhone and iPad do when that restoration is complete? I think I can turn off iCloud sync, do what needs doing and then turn on iCloud again, but Apple is relatively clear that doing that will cause a full resynchronization, with every picture in the "new" database being synced up to iCloud and then back down to the iPhone and iPad. And that is what I'm trying to avoid, or find some way to cut it short.

BTW, on the original problem, Photos processed zero pictures overnight, so the finish time is now infinite.

How about we continue the discussion there? I am pretty sure there is no solution to the problem of this thread, so the other one is of more interest to me right now.