After upgrading to 12.0.1 the Photos app shows 0 Photos scanned / 12,110 remaining. It's been 3 days. The power is plugged in. Activity Monitor shows the CPU is 97% idle.
I need to find photos for a celebration of life event tomorrow. Is the "People" feature no longer supported? Does this reset for every n.0.x update? Is there a way to force Photos app to use some of the 97% CPU idle to scan faces?
MacBook Pro with Touch Bar
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:
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.
Photos face scanning in Monterey still seems to be as lazy as it was in Big Sur. I made a smallish (2000 photos, 100 videos) brand new (cleanly installed) Monterey Photos album a few days ago but still 0 faces scanned. Yes, sometimes it might begin doing its stuff after a few weeks but I am not holding my breath.
Also the Big Sur "Export IPTC as XMP" flaw with western and southern locations is there in Monterey (reported to Photos feedback several months ago).
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252258329
Exporting metadata (Captions, Keywords) also to .jpg is now fixed.
Yes, there is a View People Album. There are entries. The person whose face I need to find shows two images - the ones I manually identified. After over 12 hours of my MB Pro being plugged in, Mail in foreground, not using the computer overnight, CPU is still 98% idle, there is still no scanning. photolibraryd show CPU time of 2:08.85 (I believe that's related to streaming), photoanalysisd shows 3:26.61 (I believe that may be related to scanning photos). But nothing apparent is happening.
Yes. Clicking Confirm Additional Photos lead to the message "There don't appear to be any additional photos of [name]". This is the patriarch of the family. There are dozens of photos with him in it. I'm now manually plowing through over 12,000 photos.
The problem is much worse than I thought. Before 12.0.1 all was working fine in Photos. Now:
I have the same issues and of course that library repair is something I did as well but nothing changed. I have my complete photo collection on an external hard disk (1TB of size having ExFAT format). What before Monterey worked well is now not working anymore. The photoanalysisd process is doing something when the Photos app is closed. Also mediaanalysisd and photolibraryd has some CPU usage. But I have no clue what and after about 3 minutes at most the CPU usage is going down to 0 for these processes. Is there a way to see the log messages of these processes? If I open the process stats within the activity monitor there are 137627 errors. Can I somehow analyze what the problem is there?
But I have to say that the most wanted feature for me - the photo search by map - is now working again. That's huge. 🎉 Thank you 🙏
And exFAT is an inappropriate file system? It is never secure to store private photo collections on an external hard disk. Even SDD disks can stop working at once. The file system can't help there. That's why I have my huge collection on a very fast Samsung T5 backed up via rsync from a NAS. And I'm using that exFAT to share the photos between Windows computers because these cannot read APFS or macOS extended.
But that's obviously not the cause of that photoanalysisd issue here as my test photo library (lying on my macOS extended hard disk having a sole photo also within that same Pictures folder imported) is still not analyzed and still shows "0 Photos scanned". And as long as nobody can tell me how to see the log messages of these services it will stay a mystery what is going on there. I would be OK if I would see some log message "you have an exFAT drive mounted, will not parse that macOS extended photo library".
And exFAT is an inappropriate file system?
For a Photos Library, yes.
It is never secure to store private photo collections on an external hard disk.
No less secure than any other, really. None is perfect. Hence back ups.
That's why I have my huge collection on a very fast Samsung T5 backed up via rsync from a NAS.
Do T5s come a different speeds? And backed up from a NAS? (Another inappropriate location for a Photos Library, btw).
Where does Photos come into your workflow at all?
Log messages can be viewed via the Console app. One really big tip: there are utterly useless, as they're really private messages from developers to themselves, but hey, knock yourself out by all means.
>> And exFAT is an inappropriate file system?
> For a Photos Library, yes.
Because of what?
> Do T5s come a different speeds?
It's at least faster than a spinning hard drive. Photos are immediately loaded. Feels fluent but haven't done a performance measurement, tbh.
> And backed up from a NAS? (Another inappropriate location for a Photos Library, btw).
I wouldn't say so. The data are RAID-synced. Of course it isn't geo-spreaded but that risk I take. We can discuss about that a long time but ...
> Log messages can be viewed via the Console app.
... how can I view these logs. I mean with which command. Something like tail -f /var/log/photoanalysisd.log ?
t_h_a_l_i_s wrote:
>> And exFAT is an inappropriate file system?
> For a Photos Library, yes.
Because of what?
Because Apple says so:
Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
And we have found that using a non-supported file system tends to cause little bits of corruption that tend to bite you in the butt over time.
> Do T5s come a different speeds?
It's at least faster than a spinning hard drive.
I just wondered if your T5s were faster than mine.
> And backed up from a NAS? (Another inappropriate location for a Photos Library, btw).
I wouldn't say so. The data are RAID-synced.
And again, what you say is of little relevance. A NAS has a double hit as a location for a Photos Library: a: the disk format is wrong and b: Photos has no code to allow it to manage a network location. Again feel free to put your Library in these locations, just don't be surprised by the inevitable dataloss.
> Log messages can be viewed via the Console app.
... how can I view these logs. I mean with which command. Something like tail -f /var/log/photoanalysisd.log ?
I just launch the app and look. Have you tried that?
@Keith Barkley: You were right. It is not the format of the external drive. The photos can lie on an ExtFAT file system. It has just something to do with patience :) Works now. Maybe the complaints about photoanalysisd consuming to much computing resources made the Apple developers using less resources and that's why it is also taking longer until the whole (big) collection is rescanned 👍
The photos can lie on an ExtFAT file system.
Of course it can. And dataloss can result. Just don't be surprised when it does.
For the benefit of others who might read this thread I'll stress again: The Photos library needs to be on a disk formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or apfs. It should not be on any other format disk, not should it be on a NAS. If the library is on an inappropriately formatted disk the you risk significant dataloss.
It's now been 20 days. I've tried everything suggested here, plus I restored from a photolibrary prior to 12.0.1. Still 0 Photos scanned of 12,111. The library is on my internal SSD, so the ExFAT consideration is not applicable.
20 days!
When my computer upgraded to Monterey, my Photos app also upgraded itself and then got stuck for a long time at the "Curate Photos" step of ~33,000 photos (in a relatively neat photo library just established a few months ago). I followed some of the advice here (turn off screen saver, run in background, reboot once a day) to no avail. I then removed ~250 photos that I knew had unusual calendar settings and possibly other wonky format settings from another country. Good news is that the "Curate" task then finished in a heart beat.
The bad news is that the task of "Scan Photos/Faces/People" still has not budged. 0 photos scanned of ~33,000 in five days (last 36 hours screen on continuously).
Are the issues that can make Curate get stuck the SAME issues that can make Scan Faces get stuck? What else can I do on my end besides wait patiently? For instance, how can I figure out if there are any formats or files that are problematic?
This seems to be the best and most successful method. Much appreciated. Did 35,000 photos in about six hours on a MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020). I, however, saw the action begin shortly after restarting photos when, after three hours, nothing in activity monitor was firing off any CPU action on the various processes.
Note that for me it was a rescan of an existing library but in checking some people there were loads of new photos that had been picked up. Perhaps the Monterey logic is a little deeper than before. Also noted that the conversion service also ran for an hour before the scanning began.
If only it was easier.....and reliable.
0 Photos scanned
