How can I gat photos to scan the faces in my library?

Eg This page in the User Guide contains the below info:

https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/photos/pht1ed9b966d/6.0/mac/11.0

Store imported files outside the Photos library

1. In the Photos app  on your Mac, choose Photos > Preferences, then click General.
2. Unselect the “Copy items to the Photos library” tick box.
3. Now, when you import photos or video, Photos leaves the files in their original location and accesses them as referenced files.

Find a referenced file in the Finder

1. In the Photos app  on your Mac, select a referenced file.
2. Choose File > Show Referenced File in Finder.

Copy referenced files into a Photos library

You can copy referenced files into your photo library so they’re easier to back up and are automatically stored in iCloud if iCloud Photos is turned on.

1. In the Photos app  on your Mac, select the files that you want to copy into the photo library.
2. Choose File > Consolidate.
3. Click Copy.

Hi kirkbroo1,

The way I understand it, Photos scans the faces when you first import the photos.

Apple has a support page about using the People album in Photos, and how it works..

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207103

Hope this helps.

PS The above link is for Photos on iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

The link below is for Photos on your Mac:

https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/photos/phtad9d981ab/mac

Cheers

Big Sur 11.2.3 Photos.app 6.0 does not automatically scan faces in my mac Mini 2018 like it used to do in Mojave.

I have tried it with small new test libraries as well as real large libraries.

A few days ago I again created a new Photos library with the default settings:

0. Big Sur 11.2 cleanly installed from a bootable USB flash drive installer to a freshly formatted APFS internal 1TB SSD device with FileVault OFF (now updated to 11.2.3). I have just a few installed Apple and 3rd party apps (FCP, Compressor, VMware, GraphicConverter, BBEdit, LibreOffice, Dropbox usually OFF, Carbon Copy Cloner, Spotify, MacPorts, exiftool), no 3rd party virus apps or "cleaners".

1. Option-launched Photos.app and created the default ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary. I have not yet set it as system library but previously that did not help.

2. Imported images (most .jpg, a few .tif, .png, heic with Captions, Keywords, locations, ratings) folder-by-folder to named albums, then the same to movies (most H.264 or H.265 .mp4, .m4v or .mov). Library size 322 GB.

3. A few days and a few reboots and cold boots. Photos.app open, in the background, quit and Mac idling several hours per day.

Result:

In addition in the Library view the analyzing goes on forever without any results either:

Hey, after just sitting there for more than a month, Big Sur Photos.app has finally started to add faces two weeks ago! It seems to prioritize Memories because it also slowly adds them before adding more faces (380 GB Photos library in an internal Mac mini 2018 SSD at ~/Pictures). In Mojave this process took "only" a few days or up to a week for basically the same photos and movies library also created from scratch when Photos randomly decided to do that.

I also have a hunch that the face recognition now best wakes up if I happen to open and quit Photos.app (don't know if that is necessary...) and then go Finder > toolbar > user account icon > Login Window... and leave it at that for a while (I otherwise seldomly do that). Looks promising:

@kirkbro61 did you ever get this resolved?

I have the same issue and it occurred after I rebuilt the Library. I believe there was a message noting that might happen but I assumed, incorrectly, that there would be a way to force a rescan. I may revert to exporting all 20k originals and creating a new library and import again which may cause me to lose all my keywords which would be very painful.

I wonder what is common for those setups where this does not work? (Dock on the right instead at the bottom, no-sleep hot corner at the top-left, or some other obscure system setting I happen to use?? ...FWIW there have been weird bug workarounds like the macOS 10.14.5 QuickTime Fullscreen movie black screen on mouse time out fix: fiddle System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Cursor size to some other value and maybe back where it used to be).

I have a cleanly installed Big Sur with a brand-new Photos library with default settings. I have tested this also on super-cleanly installed Big Sur on an external disk with smallish simple test libraries. In Mojave this works and I have wondered if my system is TOO clean, i.e. it lacks some component from older systems that is needed for this?!

Seems it might be worth looking through the Photos User Guide that Apple has online:

https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/photos/toc

Maybe something there may help you.

Gosh. Have you tried re-starting your computer, and checking again ?

If anyone has a solution to this, I would sure love to know it! Another glass of wine has not helped one bit.

Once you have taken a picture that includes somebody’s face, the facial recognition process will automatically start as you lock your iPhone and connect it to power.