User profile for user: deege
deege Author
User level: Level 1
49 points

What does "not using the app" when scanning for People in Photos mean?

I have a MacBook 16 running macOS Monterey 12.6. I had almost 900G of photos and videos and no room to update so I moved my library to an external hard drive. Through several openings and closings of the app and restarting the Mac a couple of times without anything happening, I ran the "repair" on my library and after a couple of days the thumbnails are all filled, the pictures and videos are up to date and synced with my iPhone (I use iCloud), and everything except People appears to be just fine.


I have had my Mac connected to power through all of this and it continues to be plugged in. I have kept (and will keep) the external drive connected at all times.


When I go to my People album it says 0 (yes, zero) Photos Scanned and below it "Photos will continue scanning your remaining 48, 069 photos when you’re not using the app and your Mac is connected to power". When the library was on my Mac, all photos were scanned and I had everyone tagged, organized and all set.


My question is:

What does "Photos will continue scanning your remaining 48, 069 photos when you’re not using the app and your Mac is connected to power" exactly mean? Does "not using the app" mean I keep it open on my screen but in the background while using Safari or other apps? Does it mean to collapse it so the thumbnail is in the toolbar with the dot under it? Or does it mean to completely close it?

MacBook Pro

Posted on Sep 18, 2022 7:14 AM

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User profile for user: léonie
léonie
User level: Level 10
200,627 points

Posted on Sep 18, 2022 7:54 AM

You can do any of these things - just do not interact with Photos.

And the Photos background processes need to be running.

It may help to quit Photos, then restart the Mac, launch Photos again, then ignore it and work with other apps. restating the Mac and relaunching Photos will ensure, that the background processes will start again, if they have crashed. Photos has to be launched first thing after a restart to kick off the background processes.


My library is a bit smaller than yours, 55000 photos . It took several weeks until all photos and videos had been scanned for faces. If the number of photos to be scanned does not change for several days, you may have a video or photo in your library, that is incompatible with the current system version and cannot be processed by Photos.

I checked the videos in my library by creating a second library and importing the older videos one-by-one into this new library. I found three videos, that gave an error message, when I tried to import them to Photos. After removing these videos from my main library, the face detection started again.


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User profile for user: léonie
léonie
User level: Level 10
200,627 points

Sep 18, 2022 7:54 AM in response to deege

You can do any of these things - just do not interact with Photos.

And the Photos background processes need to be running.

It may help to quit Photos, then restart the Mac, launch Photos again, then ignore it and work with other apps. restating the Mac and relaunching Photos will ensure, that the background processes will start again, if they have crashed. Photos has to be launched first thing after a restart to kick off the background processes.


My library is a bit smaller than yours, 55000 photos . It took several weeks until all photos and videos had been scanned for faces. If the number of photos to be scanned does not change for several days, you may have a video or photo in your library, that is incompatible with the current system version and cannot be processed by Photos.

I checked the videos in my library by creating a second library and importing the older videos one-by-one into this new library. I found three videos, that gave an error message, when I tried to import them to Photos. After removing these videos from my main library, the face detection started again.


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What does "not using the app" when scanning for People in Photos mean?

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