Using Face recognition in Photos for Mac (Sierra)

Looks like iOS doesn't sync face recognition with Photos for Mac, nor between iOS devices, which is disappointing.

However the face recognition function appears to be a vast improvement in identifying faces (might be wrong, but it does not appear to use the faces generated by manual recognition).

I'm trying to work out how this happens when I leave the Mac overnight. It states that faces are scanned when the Photos app is not in use and the Mac is plugged in.

Does this mean that the Photos app needs to be closed and the Mac plugged in and open? Or can the app be open (but not in use) and the Mac shut?

Thank you

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5), + iPhone 6 Plus & iPad Air 2

Posted on Sep 22, 2016 6:49 AM

22 replies

Sep 29, 2016 1:47 AM in response to léonie

Has somebody the same issue as I have - the face recognition doesn't continue. I have always about 12.000 photos which have still to be scanned. I tried it with a restart, keep Photos open, keep it closed but nothing happens. The program photoanalysisd is in background but doing nothing.

léonie

Level 10

200,687 points

Sep 29, 2016 2:33 AM in response to Tommi 7711

If it is a portable Mac try to disconnect from power and plug it in again. Some other user posted this fix. I cannot find the link to that post again.

Sep 29, 2016 5:26 AM in response to léonie

I found the solution for my issue. Somehow in the photo library the flag was set to optimize the disk space of my MacBook (wasn't the case before the upgrade to Sierra). About 12000 pictures were already locally removed. Seems that exactly these pictures have been the ones which could not be longer scanned. After changing the settings the face detection started to continue with the scan.

Oct 1, 2016 3:10 AM in response to Tommi 7711

I've the same problem. There are still 700 pics in the queue since approx. 10 days. The process is in background, works for 30sec, then going to "sleep" (0% CPU). Re-plugging does not help...

Oct 1, 2016 8:41 AM in response to Max Moore Sen.

I could fix the issue by changing the setting from the library from "optimize disk space" to "download all originals". Afterwards the scann process completed it's work.

Jun 14, 2017 7:56 AM in response to Tommi 7711

How did you turn off that flag? I want to do the something because my MacBook is not recognizing faces in photos - the same problem you had.

Jun 14, 2017 8:23 AM in response to LarryHN

Thanks - just did it, now will see what happens.

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Using Face recognition in Photos for Mac (Sierra)