Hi, Basically what the subject says. I open up iphoto. Go to faces>persons name and then confirm additonal faces. Click done, then I get the spinning ball of death for hours. I have done the whole rebuilding the data base still no joy. So fustrating iPhoto used to work so well.
A few points; my iPhoto library contains about 18,000 photos and the library sits on an external hard drive.
Any help would be appeciated.
iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)
How is the EHD formatted? It should be OS X Extended (journaled) with ownership set to be ignored.
You might try the following:
Using iPhoto Library Manager to Rebuild Your iPhoto Library
and select the library you want to add from those in the selection window.
Note 1: This creates a new library based on the LIbraryData.xml file in the library and will recover Events, Albums, keywords, titles and comments. However, books, calendars, cards and slideshows will be lost.
Note 2: Your current library will be left untouched for further attempts at a fix if so desired.
OT
How is the EHD formatted? It should be OS X Extended (journaled) with ownership set to be ignored.
You might try the following:
Using iPhoto Library Manager to Rebuild Your iPhoto Library
and select the library you want to add from those in the selection window.
Note 1: This creates a new library based on the LIbraryData.xml file in the library and will recover Events, Albums, keywords, titles and comments. However, books, calendars, cards and slideshows will be lost.
Note 2: Your current library will be left untouched for further attempts at a fix if so desired.
OT
Thanks for this. While it has fixed the issue and iPhoto does seem to be running more smoothly and can update faces etc. However, while iPhoto library manager has successfully copied my iphoto library including existing faces etc. It does seem to not recognise new faces and seems to have forgotten what old faces look like. My only concern is that when iPhoto starts remembering faces then the same issue will occur. Is there a limit to the amount of faces iPhoto can recognise?
Is there a limit to the amount of faces iPhoto can recognise?
Not that I'm aware of. How is the EHD drive formatted? Is it formatted as shown in this screenshot:
Yes it is. This is one of the first things I checked. I will continue to update the faces data as I add more photos. And will add to the discussion if I run into any problems. I think it may have something to do with the fact that my iPhoto library is quite old and has been upgraded a few times as iPhoto updates versions.
Thanks for your help.
I have the same problem. iPhoto hanges when updating faces (or goes unresponsive for several minutes). Rebuilding the library provided only minimal performance improvement.
As genpro described, iPhoto now doesn't seem to recognize new faces after the rebuild.
Any assistance would be appreciated.
In the Info tray make sure the Faces section is open:
To be clear, iPhoto recognizes that there are faces in the picture. But, doesn't seem to be making guesses as to whose face it is. All faces are shown as unknown.
For example, although I have 6,000 pictures of my daughter with her face tagged in the library, iPhoto didn't recognize her face in a single picture on any picture imported over the last month.
I hate to say it but I find Faces more that a bit flaky too - i use it and find the results are worthwhile but the process is not clean and the reconization is fair sometimes, poor others and great occasionally - I jsut have accepted it as being what it is and go on my way
LN
genpro I think you are seeing what I have seen many times. I hesitate to disagree with so formidable and respected an authority as Old Toad, but I do think there is more to this issue, and that the real problem has been missed.
What happens is that the process that searches for new faces takes a long time to run. While it runs iPhoto becomes unresponsive, as you have noted. When iPhoto finishes all its database housekeeping it becomes responsive. You can see this by watching iPhoto's use of cpu time in Activity Monitor. When suggested found faces are confirmed as correct or as incorrect, iPhoto seems to go through several steps. One is marking the databases according the the confirmed responses, another is using the newly modified database of positive face exemplars to search the newly modified database of all found faces. When these databases become large, the calculations ale a very long time. The search algorithmapparently stores intermediate values during the search. When these databases become large, the intermediate stored values become impossibly large. Often large amounts of virtual memory are used, meaning the data manipulation requires disk access and swapping, slowing the process much more. The combination of slow complex calculation and massive intermediate stored value overwhelms your computer. When the search ends cpu cycles become available and memory becomes freed, and iPhoto and your computer return to normal operation.
When you used iPLM the search for new found faces proceeded slightly differently, and did not hold up the computer.
Use Activity Monitor to observe cpu and memory usage next time you confirm suggested found faces, and you will see what I am telling you.
One workaround is to do something else and let iPhoto run until it is finished, This only works for smaller libraries or smaller sets of exemplars. For larger ones the memory requirements can easily be too great for the Faces search to complete. In this case the only solution is to Force-Quit iPhoto. In general Force-Quit while a database is updating is not a good idea. In this case it seems to be the only solution, and usually does not seem to cause too much trouble.
I have reported this to Apple. I urge you to do so also.
As LarryHN notes, "I find Faces more that a bit flaky". 😟
iPhoto 9.5.1 keeps hanging when updating faces.
