Photos Stuck at “0 photos scanned” Since iOS 15 Upgrade

Ok, Here's what I did to solve it! (Your milage may vary). FWIW - tool dozens of hours to troubleshoot / fix with 50k+ files.

Best I can tell, the analysis gets stuck or won't start until uploaded to iCloud is complete. Here's what I did to fix:

1) remove non-compatible files. For me I had about 30 photoshop files (.psd) that were holding up the process. Use Smart Folders to identify and then export and delete. Other threads have the list of file types.

2) remove corrupted files. this one is harder, as I had 50k+ files. The problem files were mostly movies. And most problems were slow motion. Use smart albums to filter and then export. There was one .mov fie that would crash photos if opened. Hard to spot, but it was blurry in preview and/or colors off in preview

3) *duplicates*! I have a large number of dups from prior imports and mergers. Most are OK , but some causing problems. To solve:

• check if the number of items on local cpu are same as iCloud. For me, there were more local than in iCloud.
• Then identify those that are not uploaded. (Smart Folders for "unable to upload" won't work!)
• For each year (or month) identify number of pics/mov - manually scan if there are more local than iCloud. Find the duplicates and then delete (or export) from local. All of mine were associated with HDR where the camera also captured raw or jpeg.
• Repeat for all years/months (I had once cpu w/ download originals, and one with iCloud photos optimize to compare)
• once number of pics locally = number of pics on iCloud; the analysis proceeded ok!

All in all, was a pain in the A** but it does work now

I was also contacted by Apple Support so it seems they are reading this topic too.

They got some log files during a online chat session.

BTW my issue was solved after Resetting People Suggestions in Settings/Photos. After a few days in a wall charger, some people popped up

I bought a new iPhone 13 Pro at the start of december 2021 with iOS 15 on it. It imported all photos nicely from iCloud and started scanning faces at night. But then it stopped and was stuck at about a remaining 8000 for weeks. Even after upgrading to iOS 15.2.

Last night I tried the following:

1. Close the Photos-app
2. Switch off the iPhone
3. Start the iPhone
4. Plug it in the charger

When I clicked on the peoples album this morning it finally stopped showing this message and all people where populated with a lot more photos (and a lot I had to confirm).

Also posted this as an answer to my own question on https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253509631.

I’ve had a ticket open for a couple months now. Submitted diagnostics a couple times. Went through the “upgrade iOS” charade a couple times. Get new logs. I was just updated yesterday that Apple engineers confirmed this is an issue they are working to resolve but gave no expected timeframe to resolve.

eseerc wrote:

As an aside, I think it’s rediculous that the people tagging by picture is not part of the iCloud backup. I spent many hours curating my photo library with people tags on my old iPhone, now I have to start over simply for having a new phone. As someone who upgrades annually, this is a terrible customer experience.

Odd. All my people tagging has been preserved across hardware and OS upgrades. In addition tagging done on my Mac is reflected on my phone.

In other news, iOS 15.1 seems to have broken things loose. It processed a few hundred photos after upgrading, the first progress on the backlog made in weeks. I expect to see more after I leave it powered overnight.

I've also had a call from a very nice gentleman at Apple support — clearly they're working this problem.

An update on my situation… or maybe a summary from the very start:

• Nothing at all happens for ~2 weeks after upgrading to iOS 15
• Then suddenly ~38000 scanned in one night
• Slow progress for a couple of days — a thousand here, a few hundred there
• Submitted diagnostics to Apple on request
• Then suddenly, that very same night, ~50000 photos scanned, leaving only a few thousand to go
• At this point, I no longer see the modal warning screen when I try to access the "People" album; I can now only tell the remaining number by going to People and scrolling all the way to the bottom
• Slow progress again, with maybe a few hundred a night
• Stuck on 668 to go… for some days now

Update: Since updating to 15.1 yesterday it's managed to process ~500 more photos. During that time it spent 3-4 hours locked and connected to power during the day and then another 8h over night.

It looks like there are a lot of processing jobs contending for the ANE and CPU. Last night, monitoring the console, I saw that it spent at least an hour each on on com.apple.mediaanalysisd.photos.ocr and com.apple.corespotlight.knowledge. At also spent significant amounts of time on others. Right now it's churning away on com.apple.corespotlight.knowledge again.

Hopefully it'll get through everything soon.

Interesting. From looking at log files it appears that iOS is doing a lot of AI-related analysis after the update. It may be that it just takes a while for it to spend enough time on face scanning, especially with older phones that have slower Apple Neural Engines.

That said, mine has been stuck with just over 2K to go for a week. Yesterday Apple support pulled some diagnostic info off my phone, so maybe they'll address the issue in a later update to iOS 15. In the meantime, it does seem to be processing faces in new photos now.

After days with no apparent progress, I noticed yesterday that the last ~500 pending photos had finally been processed.

I think there are probably still bugs, but it's also pretty clear that the new image recognition features in the latest versions of iOS and MacOS involve a huge amount of processing, way beyond the re-indexing of text in that happened in upgrades to previous major releases of the OSs.

It happened to me on desktop upgrade to Monterey 12.1. It was stuck on "finish scanning" for almost a week. Tried creating a new profile and forced a complete download (just over 11,000 pics) but still no luck. I reinstalled the o/s and it reached about 90% scanned with 4 hours. The remaining 10% took more than a day. Lost some face names and continue to have problems with names syncing, including losing a lot of names.

Like the person above, I looked at Google and Lightroom. Google is web only, messy, default editing is not as good and no option for additional editing plug in. Lightroom is just a messy interface but it is better at editing. Both are better at recognizing faces and then associating names. It is missing the map and locations are only by Metadata. It only brought some of the metadata over. They also are better at showing missing names.. My library is large enough I have to pay for additional storage so the $99 a year is not a really big deal. Neither one brought over "folders" or corrected dates on pictures that were not taken on a camera. I have pretty much decided to stay with Apple Photos and realize that faces/names will not be complete.

Just an update on my situation: I'm still stuck at 0 scanned. My phone is locked and on its charger every single night, and was updated to iOS 15 on launch day.

And yet, I still find no missing functionality. All recognised faces are still there, going back to the beginning of my library. And newly added photos are classified correctly. The same goes for ML-powered object recognition.

The only mild annoyance is that I have to click through the "0 Photos Scanned" screen every time I wish to access the People Album.

And another update: On the night of 4 October, my phone suddenly started scanning photos. In fact, it managed over 38000 in that one night. The next night (that is, last night), it added another ~17000 to the tally.

I wish I could tell you something specific I did to make this happen. But, truth is, I just used my phone as usual and put it on its charger every night, as usual.

Seemingly it just wanted to wait about 2 weeks before starting the scanning process. 😐

I am in a very similar situation. I recently upgraded to an iPhone 13 Pro Max and since then the “scanning” of my pictures has been stuck for days.

As an aside, I think it’s rediculous that the people tagging by picture is not part of the iCloud backup. I spent many hours curating my photo library with people tags on my old iPhone, now I have to start over simply for having a new phone. As someone who upgrades annually, this is a terrible customer experience.

The photos apps on all my devices are also stuck at different amounts of photos scanned. For example, 24k are scanned so far, 14k are waiting to be scanned. The number of photos waiting to be scanned is reducing by a tiny amount every few days.

These two images are taken a few days apart – first on Sunday evening, and today.

I got tired of this problem when I did an experiment and had only one photo in my library. The People Album still did not populate automatically (even though I can label the detected face manually in the photo).

I've now migrated to Google Photos which is doing everything Apple Photos does and more since it works across multiple platforms more seamlessly (and is cheaper for storage).

For now, the main feature that iCloud Photos offers ahead of Google Photos is that the photos are still synced onto the local device for easy offline viewing.