.... may also be in the photos below

Apple Care has been in contact with me by phone and email. They send me a special application (dmg file) that upon launching read everything about my system and saved it in a 2MB data file, which I have emailed back to them.

The next step, they have informed me, is that I will be sending my 20GB photo library to one of their engineers. They are trying to replicate the problem, which I find odd since the problem seems easily replicated among all those on this discussion thread.

I tried to return the software to the Apple Store I bought it from, and they would not take it back.

Throw another "me too" on the pile. Just installed iLife '09 and the Faces feature just spins and spins. It has recognized a handful of faces, but once it did the first few, nothing else has been picked up.

Same problem here. I've got almost 20,000 photos, (285 events) which seems like a lot, but I bet lots people have plenty more than that. It took overnight for all the faces to scan, but after tagging a couple hundred photos (30 individuals' faces), it's never come up with any suggestions, even after I left it running overnight and most of today.

Add me to the "me too list"

10.6, 15,257 pictures, 512 events

Spinning disk, no suggestions (though lots of fan noise)

Me Too!
6500 photos arranged into events, Faces started OK recognising 1 person, now just get the spinning wheel even if left all day and night.

Would very much like to know what the heck is going on here.

Same story here 😟

I just upgraded from OS X 10.4.8 to 10.6 yesterday with the Mac Box Set including iLife '09. I have 9,500 photos. It took 90 (?) minutes for the initial Face scan. I started with a half-dozen people and tagged a few photos. It couldn't find a single match, the wheel just kept spinning, even after leaving it alone for hours.

I did the following:

1. Deleted the face.db and face_blob.db (as other suggested).
2. Made sure to remove Movie files from iPhoto (as suggested at http://www.somelifeblog.com/2009/02/iphoto-09-faces-crashes-when-clicking.html).
3. Restarted many times. Allowed iPhoto Face scan to run again (took 1+ hour).
4. I did NOT try to rebuild the iPhoto library as some have suggested.

At first I made some small breakthrough. Out of the 8 people I added, finally I got one of them (my 6-month-old son) to start seeing some matches. iPhoto actually did a pretty good job of matching although there were some hilarious mistakes (my son is pale white and bald and it matched him with a photo of a 10-year-old black boy and one of my adult friends with a thick mustache and black curly hair).

Anyway, I found that quitting and restarting iPhoto, it would sometimes match my son again, and sometimes it would just spin.

It could not make matches with any of the other faces. I even left the computer on all night, no progress. Here I am the next morning, and Faces recognition won't work at all.

Sooo, I think the only interesting note I have to add to the conversation is that it did just barely work for me, but just a couple of times, and just on a single Face. Disappointing. If you think that going from 10.5 to 10.6 will help, it didn't work for me. I never tried iLife 09 on my older 10.4 OS.

I'm subscribing to this topic, throwing my hat in the ring as another person having this issue. Specifics are quite similar to previous posters.

Had 10.5.8 with iLife '08 previously on two machines. Bought the family pack box set and upgraded to 10.6 and iLife '09 (iPhoto 8.1). iPhoto upgraded my 37GB library and I started working on faces. After tagging several hundred pictures and 70+ unique faces, I tried bringing up a person in faces to see the suggestions below and got the spinning circular arrows icon. I let it sit for over 24 hours with no change.

Anyone calling in for support, please be sure and post back your experience and status as you can, as some of you have already done. Thank you for that! I may have to call in for support on this, too.

Another "me too" story here.... I purchased Snow Leopard and iLife '09 on Friday specifically for the benefit of using "Faces"... I've been working on this for 2 days with no luck even after going through all the suggested steps in this forum plus other sites/discussions.

At first I thought it wasn't working due to the size of my library, but after seeing other comments here my 14,000 photos in 210 Events shouldn't be causing a problem.

Sadly, this is my first major disappointment with Apple; but after waiting so long for this product and the $$$ and the wasted hours of manually tagging hundreds of faces I was really hoping for better from Apple. I wish I had read these forums before wasting money and my weekend!

I hope a solution is available soon.

same here... updated to SL on friday, update to iPhoto 09 also on friday (got the all in one bundle).. and i do have about 7000 pictures in my database.

Is it possible to delete all my imported events and the reimport them one at a time without losing information?

Add me to the list. Just got a brand new macbook pro ,and installed snow leopard. I tried just using 6,000 of my 80,0000 pictures, and it just keeps spinning.

Same problem for me. At least I'm not alone. I just upgraded to iLife 09 as I was upgrading to OS 10.6 at the same time. Arrow just spins. 7000 photos. Nothing weird about my system. This was the whole reason I upgraded to iLife 09.

Same problem here. I can also add that when I go to certain photos where faces have been found it asks me to confirm the face (and the association is correct). But when I go to that person's face listing, those "pending" photos don't show up there. Just the spinning icon as described in this issue.

So Iphoto seems to have found some potential matches but it doesn't know to put them into the "XXX may also be in the photos below" section.

very good news!

i downloaded http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/ and did a reimport database! and now faces works like a charm!

hope this helps!

And another me too! 20gb photo library and get the spinning wheel of death with no suggestions....trying fixes with no hope of success...

gerbsen,

There is no "reimport database" option in IPLM that I can see, nor is that mentioned in the documentation. There is a "rebuild library" function. Is that what you meant to write?

Thanks.