0 Photos scanned

Hi elizabethfromcambridge,

in my case, for "scanning Photos/Faces/People", it worked to activate the Energy Saver feature "Prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping ...". The screensaver was active, and the screen of my iMac was off over night.

What I did in detail:

• restart the Mac, make sure that no app is running
• check that the Energy Saver feature "Prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping ..." is on
• check with Activity Monitor that there are no "hanging" or stuck processes related to Photos.app. If there are processes that are not changing, quit them. Using the search string "photo" selects the relevant processes. The "circle with X" allows to Stop a selected process.
• open Photos.app - this should result in about 4 to 5 running processes detectable in Activity Monitor (filtered for "photo" in the Process Name).
• once these processes (including photoanalysisd and photolibraryd) have been started, quit Photos.app and leave the Mac alone over night.

For me, this has worked several times (e.g. after using the Repair function of Photos.app) to get about 40.000 photos/pictures scanned.

Activating the Energy Saver feature "Prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping ..." was exactly what fixed the problem with "0 photos scanned" for me. Running Photos.app on an iMac24 M1. Over night, about 40.000 photos were completed.

I used Activity Monitor.app to follow the progress.

People still works.

Try this:

Quit photos

Open Activity Monitor from the Launchpad

Find the photolibraryd process

Stop it (the "x" in the octagon)

Open photos

leave the Mac plugged in and walk away

Ignore the message about 0 photos scanned. Photos does not update it instantly. My Mac needed more than a week for the first update of the message with 50000 photos and videos in the Photos Library.

And stop using Photos. The Photos window must not be the frontmost window, but you have to launch Photos, so it will kick off the background processes.

But you should still be able to use the People album, if you need it, even if the new object recognition and face detection have not been completed. Is there no button "Open People album" above the message with the "0 photos scanned"? After a system upgrade or update, the face detection will run again, if the algorithm has been improved or changed in any way, but the previously detected faces will still be available in the People album and we can also add additional faces manually, by circling faces on a photo or video.

Have you checked, if your library contains photos or videos that can no longer be processed by Photos on the most recent system versions? such legacy items can prevent Photos from scanning the library, particularly older videos that are not HEVC or H.264. To check, if a media item is compatible with your system version, export it from Photos with "File > Export > Export unmodified original, then try to import it into a new, empty Photos Library. Any item you cannot import to a new library needs to be removed from your current library and convert to a more compatible format.

I found I had to turn off the power saving feature and let my iMac24 m1 run over night. I had done that for a different reason, but was pleasantly surprised when all my images were scanned the next morning.

Just reporting back that the steps from @bwadma worked for me!

I futzed around with closing the Photos app as directed above from the activity monitor. At 36 hours I was not optimistic because still nothing seemed to have changed and the CPU usage %/times for the photoanalysisd and photolibraryd processes seemed really low to me. I was getting ready to come back here to complain / get help but I got distracted with work stuff for a few days. Came back (~72 hours from having followed instructions above) and the Scanning faces was DONE!!!

When I went into the People albums, it prompted me to review more photos, especially of my Child A (~3,000 photos added) and Child B (~1,500 photos added).

In case anyone is also trying to deal with "unknown" faces, I figured out something helpful. When you go into the People album for someone, scroll to the heading "Groups and People." You can then scroll to the right and you might find images of an "unknown" person. In my case, I found ~5 more versions of my Child A, and was able to click into the unknown orphan version and apply a name, which merges them into their main entry. You can try this searching and relabelling by going in under various People profiles and you might see different selections of "unknown." I also found it helpful to make sure I had a really good photo as the profile picture for each People, so I would recognize when "unknown" was showing me a different image. Anyhoo, after about an hour of repeating this over and over, I found and fixed ~25 orphan/unknown people profiles. I suspect there are more, but hey, this is progress.

Perhaps your library is corrupt?

Repair your library in Photos on Mac

If you experience problems with photos in a library, you can try to repair it. If problems persist, you can also restore your libraryfrom a Time Machine backup.

Important: You should back up your photo library before repairing it.

1. If the Photos app on your Mac is open, choose Photos > Quit Photos.
2. Press Option-Command and double-click the Photos icon in the Applications folder (or click the Photos icon in the Dock).
3. In the Repair Library window, click Repair to rebuild your photo library.

But actually if something is stored on an external drive with an exFAT or an AFP should make no difference as the operating system has to abstract that away

This is utterly wrong. The Photos library must be on a disk formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or APFS. Ed of story. Regardless of what you think "should" be the case, this is actually the case. The disk format matters.

And why has that worked for me on Big Sur?

There's nothing to stop you storing the db on the FAT disk. It's your data. But Apple say that it needs to be on a disk formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or APFS. Why? Because on an inappropriately formatted disk things like this arise, plus there is a very high risk of slow creeping invisible damage to the db, stuff that might not surface for months.

https://support.apple.com/en-ie/HT201517

@Matti Haveri: I read that, too. But actually if something is stored on an external drive with an exFAT or an AFP should make no difference as the operating system has to abstract that away. The only important thing is to read these files and their metadata. As it worked before there has to be a change in Monterey regarding this. I now tried to create a new media library on my hard drive adding just one picture also from my hard drive. Made that library the system library. Closed the app, restarted the operating system. Still no photo (this single one) processed.

@Keith Barkley: I will give that a chance this night. Thanks. If that will not help maybe it is wise to have a look at developer.apple.com and create a clone. Let's see :)

I know I tried that 5 or 6 times since I upgraded to Monterey, it seems that it takes a bit of time for Photos to sync with the analysisd changes. That is why I was pleasantly surprised after I left it overnight.

elizabethfromcambridge wrote:

I was getting ready to come back here to complain / get help but I got distracted with work stuff for a few days. Came back (~72 hours from having followed instructions above) and the Scanning faces was DONE!!!

I think this is the secret. I was going to do the exact same thing. I think Photos knows when you are thinking about it, and waits until you ignore it. Watched pots, and all that.

And you have nothing new under confirm additional photos? Near the bottom when you select a person.