@jmernin — Thanks for your hint! I suffered the same problem! (Although) my photos were at the internal SSD at the default location: ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary
TL;DR:
- Remove Login Items -> I did it.
- Malware Scan -> I did not do it.
- Configuration Reset -> I didn't nest them at all, but did some grooming. See details below. In particular deleted some orphaned .plist files from Daemons/Agents which were already uninstalled/manually-deleted but their plist file remained.
- Maybe it was neither #1 or #3 but simply the time factor. Because alltogether the computer was on 4-5 days entirely, mostly idle, photoanalysis alltogether only needed about 1h of accumulated CPU time over those 5days mostly being idle. Had plenty of "missed opportunities". Crappy algorithm.
Feedback to Apple: Going through this on each macOS update is a UX nightmare! Either make that automatic magic behind the scenes work properly (=swiftly, not waiting 4-5 days mostly idle!) or offer an explicit menu command or button "Run curation & face-detection now" with a pause/resume button, should you need your computer resources.
Long Story:
Note that in earlier times my Photos.app Library was an Aperture Library, which was converted when I upgraded from macOS 10.12 Sierra to 10.15 Catalina.
Already when updating to Catalina I suffered from photoanalysisd 's poor implementation. Nothing ever happened. Only when I configured power management to run infinite, once after an overnight session it had kicked in, and still on the morning it was running, and I left it. But then at least it was done.
But this time when upgrading from macOS 10.15 Catalina to macOS 11.1 Big Sur the conversion progress sucked even more!
The start was ok: Upon first launch, the app's view was blocked with an explicit message "Converting…". But after some time it was done. Transparent to the user, obvious progress, no voodoo. Ok, I thought.
After that I imported my last 3 months of photos/videos from two iPhones via USB-cable into Photos.app
Then a subsequent TimeMachine backup. Which was more or less exactly the size of my photo library. So all old master-files and new master-files plus caches/database-files were changed (on a filesystem level), so TimeMachine deemed them backup-worthy.
But then came the long frustrating wait.
Curating showed as "in progress" and face-detection as well.
Left it on for two entire days (48h) and nothing happened, photoanalysisd accumulated no CPU time, the progress indicator in Photos.app UI remained where it was forever.
Had tried to leave my MacBook Pro Retina 15in (Mid 2014) running with screen on, and with screen off.
With Photos.app in foreground or hidden in background or totally off.
With other apps on. With nothing but Finder.
All kind of permutations. To no avail!
The UI sent ambiguous mixed messages:
- Sidebar > Photos > Library: "Leave device connected to power".
- Quite clear. Whether Photos.app in foreground or hidden in background or totally off not mentioned. So seems to not matter.
- Sidebar > Photos > People: "… Photos will continue scanning your remaining X photos when you're not using the app and your Mac is connected to power."
- "when you're not using the app" is very ambiguous
- in foreground but not performing any interaction?
- in foreground but at another less dynamic screen (not "People", i.e. a static album) "not using" anything such as "editing" or "tagging"?
- Photos.app was quit, but ran once in the login session, hence "triggered/pushed photoanalysisd to do its work"?
- freshly restarted Mac, and Photos.app never manually started? photoanalysisd will kick off itself?
- If the typical Apple magic w/o further ado would work, I would not care for the wording.
- But as it was not working, no matter what interpretation/permutation I tried, this message drove me wild.
Eventually after adding another 2-3 days after the first days with no noteworthy progress it finally worked.
I opened sidebar > Library > People: And confirmed some faces and additional faces.
Then interestingly you get yet another third kind of instruction: "Updating People… People will finish updating when Photos is in the background."
So yet a third type of instruction! Cannot be more inconsistent and frustrating. Please Apple, ideally get this done in your great beloved "it just works" way (swiftly in the background!) or make it an explicit / blocking action in the UI.
Grooming details (should it help someone)
- I removed cruft files at /Library and ~/Library as instructed by @jmernin after my upgrade to macOS 11.1
- Indented lines are files that I deleted. With a comment on them after the pound symbol.
- See details in this attachment: