.... may also be in the photos below

gbradburn wrote:
Okay, so after applying the update ... only to see the spinning circle of doom, spinning happily with no sign of actually suggesting any additional pictures.

Extremely disappointing to say the least.

I do not believe that simply doing Apple's current recommendation which you followed, is enough. At the least, you will want to trash the faces files and start over with Faces. It seems like something is corrupted in there which is not actually being fixed.

The update has finally resolve the issue and work fine for me.

As said in some posts before from other users, I don't raccomend to follow the steps indicated with the update.
you MUST start from scratches.
1- install the update.
2- don't open iPhoto now.
3- delete you face.db and face-blob.db files
4- open iPhoto
5- click on faces and iPhoto will start an automatic scan of all your photo with live preview and esitmated time left to complete (it was 128 minutes on mine, ended in 113 minutes)
6- when the 5th step is complete click on pictures.
7- choose ONE picture with one person you wanna tag. add his/her name.
8- click again on faces and you'll probably see again the spinning wheel and again it's looking as non responsive. DON"T touch ANYTHING! wait! it take 5 or 6 minutes (just the first time) and then you'll get suddently the possible matches.
9- when all the possible matches are pop out in the lower window, click on confirm name, start to place ONE click on the right match, TWO click to deny a wrong match.
10- when you finish confirming hit the button END.
11- that's it, it works
12- repeat for other people starting from pictures, you'll not get anymore the spinning wheel.

For has worked and I'm finally very happy.

one note: i still have in my library videos, NEF and RAW files, gif and Jpeg, many different formats and size. I didn't get any error.

Marco

I have tried two fixes since upgrading to the latest iPhoto build...

1) I scanned all of the photos for faces per Apple's suggestion... FAILED to fix the problem after the scan.

2) I deleted the two face db files per this discussions recommendations and rescanned the library... SUCCESS. The faces feature works perfectly, for now. I have successfully identified thousand of faces over the course of a couple hours. I have had none of the issues I experienced in the last build of iPhoto.

Apple needs to update their instructions to INCLUDE deleting the faces db files from the library. It seems to be the only TRUE fix.

Thanks to this forum for your help!

It's working here with the vanilla 'detect missing faces' move and an overnight run of the spinning wheel (16000 photos). Now I've just got to go through all of them and assign them!

Well done folks!!!

I am in total agreement with the recommendation to delete your faces DB files and start over with tagging. I have been tagging for nearly 6 hours off-and-on during the day and have not had any issues with the never-ending spinning arrows waiting for recommendations. With 8.1, a new library with new photos from scratch would start doing it within a single hour.

The issue which this thread was opened for, has been resolved, in my opinion.

I have also sent the Apple techs an email regarding the findings of the users here in the forums about how to really fix it, as their 8.1.1 release tech article doesn't cut it.

Given the night and day difference from when I first started using '09 and now after the patch..it amazes me that the QA/QC process at Apple missed the difference in performance. Huge general increase in performance, just working in the app much less the use of faces. And to answer the flood of posts here, yes, just delete the two faces db files that are referenced. Takes 1 minute and is worth the time.
And for all the comments about "it just works" not working, I agree--took too long to fix. But remember, if you were doing this on Windows this problem would be standard operating procedure and you would accept it and move on (I use windows a lot).

I see many posts with the suggestion to delete the faces db files. I did not want to got his route as I had significant time spent on faces (e.g. marking unfound faces, completing names for non-matches).

I found an alternate work flow that worked for me and resulted in normal faces functionality and maintaining my existing faces tags. This requires the use of the third party iPhoto Library Manager (IPLM). I have a paid registration for IPLM, so I don't know offhand the limits of the free version of IPLM.

1) Make sure that the preserve photo attributes on the Photo Copying tab of the IPLM preferences is selected. Within the preserve photo attributes all attributes should be selected. (This may be default, but not sure.)
2) Use IPLM to create a new library.
3) In the left column (iPhoto Libraries) of IPLM select the source library. The default library created by iPhoto is named Default.
4) In the center column of IPLM select the events you wish to copy to the new library.
5) Drag and drop the selected events to the new target library in the left column of IPLM.
6) Sit back and wait while IPLM migrates your photos and associated attributes in iPhoto. iPhoto will open and close multiple times. Just leave iPhoto alone until IPLM has completed it's work. IPLM will notify you when it is complete.

This process should get all of your photos in a new library with all of their attributes (e.g. faces, keywords). The new library will not have any albums or slideshows from source photo library. For me, it was significantly simpler to recreate my albums (I only use smart albums) than it would be to redo all of the faces work.

It is possible you can alternately use the IPLM duplicate library functionality (File --> Duplicate Library), but this would not work for me. I had several events that seemed to be corrupt. When I would attempt to migrate these events via IPLM, iPhoto would hang. For these event I used the iPhoto export and import functionality (export in iPhoto from source library and import in iPhoto from target library). The events that I used iPhoto export/import lost the face tags.

I just installed the iPhoto update which says it addresses our issues. We have to perform the extra step of selecting all photos, control-clicking for the contextual menu, then select Detect Missing Faces. Apple says this should fix the problem for people who already have named faces.

Let's hope this fixes it.

J-

After deleting the faces dbase files and rebuilding the entire faces library, the issue is finally resolved. Thanks Apple for wasting a good 10 hours of my time....

The update worked! And it's pretty accurate too. I am now totally happy with the program. Just to be clear, this is version 8.11. Nice job Apple; I'm happy with it.

Installation of the update and deleting the databases worked for me too for my wife's face (1500 matches) but I got the same old spinning wheel for my face for a couple of minutes, before I gave up and went to the pub.

Maybe I just need to let it run for a while . . . Logically that should be the case I guess

Baku Steve

Great, this did the fix for me and my MacBook Pro.
Thanks Apple.

+Now please come with a fix (or repair) for the lousy "late 2006 iMac".+
+After the iPhoto update my trust in this (Fairy arrogant) company is slightly better.....+

Message was edited by: Frankyky

I'm still having issues with faces. I deleted the two db files and then had it rescan, which took about three hours for ~16k photos.

1) What I noticed is that it only found faces in my most recent photos, before, there were over a thousand photos of my daughter and now, after going through several identification runs, there's only a couple hundred. (what I mean by this is that the beach ball spins, then a whole bunch of new photos pop up, I confirm the ones that are my daughter, pretty good hit rate, click done, the ball spins again, more photos show up, lather rinse repeat)

2) After a while, after the spinning ball, it says "(Name) may also be in the photos below," but there are no photos below. On photos that I only know there are one or two, it says "(Name) may also be in the photos below. No matches found"

3) After closing iPhoto, and letting it do the saving data, when I restart it, faces automatically rescans my entire library (another three-hour process).

So for me while faces is working better than before, it's still not working as well as it has for others.

Did you install the update that came out yesterday?

After you do, you need to perform another step which is described on this link.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3941

You no longer should be messing around with things like deleting dbs and such nonsense. Follow the steps in the link and hopefully it will work for you too.

I guess I should have started out my post as saying yes, I'm running 8.1.1, yes I did as the KB article stated (FYI, I upgraded iPhoto after 8.1 was posted, so ALL of my photos were imported with 8.1 though converted would be the better phrase. It still wasn't working quite right, so I decided to wipe out the faces db files and start afresh. Which is where I am today.