How do I force scanning faces in photos

Also had the same problem. I bought a new Mac and decided to use photos instead of the app I used on all previous macs and without fail: Picasa. Unfortunately, if there is no "force scan" option or the bug is not fixed by apple to complete facial scans in a timely fashion, then the best thing for Mac users to do is to resort to using another product. Picasa scanned all of my photos and in little time. Bugs me (no pun intended) that I cannot use an Apple app product on their hardware without issues (not the 1st time). I guess iPhones bugs trump all others. I hope to run into fewer bugs in the future.

. Picasa scanned all of my photos and in little time.

But that is a very different scan. Picasa has simply scanned the file attributes (filename, keywords, exif tags). That can be done very quickly. Photos is scanning the photos themselves and trying to recognize what the photo is showing and to find out if the picture is showing a birthday cake or a kitten and is classifying the photos according to thousands of categories. That needs a very long processing time. My Mac has scanned for several days and got really hot while doing the scan. Once the scan has been finished, you can search your library for categories. Photos will find photos showing certain objects or places even if you did not tag them with keywords. Try it and search for categories like "dog", "birthday cake", "cat", "elephant", "sunset" or similar. For example, searching for the "aircraft" category produced more than hundred photos like these:

I too wish I could speed it up. I have been using this on my phone for years and thought the faces were supposed to move over now. However it seems that my mac wants to rescan them all again. Here is two days after upgrading and downloading all my photos from the icloud.

Again it is automatic and when you import new photos they will be scanned in the background - Patience is a virtue

To request things you want provide feedback to Apple - http://www.apple.com/feedback/

LN

I would also like to see the ability to force a scan, for example after importing some new photos.

Maybe the option to select and scan specific photos, even.

At the moment you have to quit Photos after the import and then wait an indeterminate time, periodically opening Photos to see if it has completed scanning.

Not a good solution!

Ken

There is no bug to be fixed - the initial scan works fine - it is slow and only works when the Mac s ppwered and awake so depending on user settings and workflows it may take even longer

Photos is optional and if you do not like it then do not use it - but the fact that it does not meet your personal dream of how it should is not a bug

L:N

I think that I actually figured it out, after trying nearly every possible solution I found online.

If you rotate your photos clockwise & counter-clockwise, it will re-scan for all the faces

This might take a few hours depending on the size of your library.

I also recommend that you don't attempt to do a huge number at a time, as photos may crash in the middle & you will have a some-photos-rotated-and-some-not mess to deal with.

Let me know if this works for you guys as well!

How much patience are you talking? I've been waiting about 6 months.

Usually a week or so - since you have a different issue it would be best to start a new thread with your specifics - Writing an effective Apple Support Communities question

LN

Give is more time with the Photos application not running, the computer awake adn powered - you can not control the scan but it so=hould complete slowly

LN

Do you have videos in your Photos Library? In my library the faces scan seemed to be stuck and did not make any progress for days, while it was scanning the videos. But in the Consolde.app I could see, that the photosanalysisd process was still running and making progress.

You can launch the Console.app from the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Type "photos" into the search field and click "Diagnostic messages" in the sidebar.

Is "photosanalysisd" still running?

And I would think that it does not really make sense to scan them at all and would expect them to be skipped.

All of my videos have been scanned for faces. You can check your videos, if the faces scan has begun by opening one of the videos with close-ups of people. It took a long time.