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.... may also be in the photos below

New MacBook Pro. Imported all my pictures. It scanned all the faces (2 hours) I started tagging photos (about 100) My library is about 20Gig.

When I go to Faces and click on a name I see the pictures I tagged then
.... may also be in the photos below
and the arrow just spins. This happens for everyone. How long should this happen? Is something broken?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Aug 21, 2009 4:18 PM

Reply
445 replies

Aug 21, 2009 9:04 PM in response to johnck78

The exact same thing happened to me this week. Please post here if you find a solution. I called AppleCare and they were unable to solve the problem over the phone. They are supposed to be working on a fix and contacting me about it this week. My photo library contains a little over 9,000 photos, so it could be a volume issue, but I let iPhoto run over night two separate times and both times the wheel just continued to spin beside the "may also be in the photos below" bar.

Aug 21, 2009 10:55 PM in response to johnck78

I have let my computer work overnight trying to identify a single new face among clear, professionally taken portrait pictures. It just spins and spins and not a single face is recommended.

I have added over 20 faces manually for two individuals, many of which are nearly identical. Once in a rare while while manually identifying pictures it would ask if it had identified a person. But, automatic recognition and recommendation does not work.

Just bought iLife two days ago, primarily for this feature. Rather disappointing so far.

Aug 21, 2009 11:56 PM in response to Randall Pinkston

You might try forcing iPhoto to rescan for Faces:

Note You will lose any work you’ve already done with Faces. This is to return to the very beginning.

Quit iPhoto.

Go to your Pictures Folder (or where ever you have your Library) and find the iPhoto Library there.

Right Click on it, and from the resulting menu select ‘Show Package Contents’. A Finder window will open and the Library will be exposed.

Find the following files:

face_blob.db
face.db

and move them to the trash.

Make no other changes.

Regards

TD

Aug 22, 2009 12:38 PM in response to Yer_Man

Terence, rebuilding the faces database did not work. First try it got stuck on a particular picture during the scanning phase. Second try, it took over two hours to go through all the photos. I then tried training it with portrait pictures where faces are very clearly identifiable. It failed to recognize a single new face from the remainder of the portrait picture.

$100 ago prior to purchasing this upgrade, I was in the same place.

Message was edited by: Matt Bianco

Message was edited by: Matt Bianco

Aug 22, 2009 1:56 PM in response to Yer_Man

Thank you for replying Terence. The Library is on the iMac hard drive in the exact location you mentioned: Pictures>iPhoto>Library>Show package contents. The two files I deleted were there.

I am not an expert user despite having a lot of Apple products. I have never changed the location of any of the default file locations for music, video or photos.

Thank you.

Aug 22, 2009 2:48 PM in response to johnck78

I am experiencing the same type of problem with the spinning wheel beside each face. I would like to compare the circumstances surrounding this problem. I upgraded to iPhoto 8.1 by way of the Migration Assistant. My previous computer had iPhoto 7, so my photos were automatically loaded into iPhoto 8.1 when I bought a MacBook Pro. The Faces feature has never worked properly for me.

Aug 22, 2009 7:45 PM in response to mrdean2

Same problem here. Upgraded to a MacBook Pro w/iLife '09, used Migration Assistant to transfer my iPhoto library-- it spent a few hours detecting faces, and I labeled a few, but then no matter how long I wait I get nothing other than the spinning icon after "X may also be in the photos below," and names are never suggested when labeling. iPhoto also is constantly using about 99% of one of the CPUs when I have it open. I tried deleting the faces database files mentioned above, but no luck.

If anyone figures out a solution for this, please post it!

Aug 24, 2009 2:47 PM in response to johnck78

Add me to the list. The little wheel next to, " *** may also be in the photos below" just keeps spinning.

I then deleted the two "face" files from the iphoto library database and allowed it to rebuild for 2 hours. That didn't fix it.

I have about 3700 pics... half of them are in RAW format so I just thought they took longer to process.

Something is definitely broke with iPhoto '09.

.... may also be in the photos below

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