People will finish updating when Photos is in the background

I came here to look for help with this issue as well. As background, my library has over 60,000 items in it. I had done various face tagging in my various devices before syncing came with High Sierra, so there has been a lot of duplicate faces and merging that I've had to do since upgrading. With my library being so big, I expect things to take a while. But it now appears to be stuck. I have multiple iOS devices set to "Optimize Storage" but my 2017 MBP is set to "Download Originals." Some observations:

• Each of my iOS devices show different numbers of "Photos Scanned" and "remaining photos." Occasionally the numbers will change, but only by small amounts (like 3-20).
• If I add/edit a face tag on one device, SOMETIMES the changes appear on the other devices. I say sometimes because occasionally, after adding or editing existing tags, I will come back later and see that all my edits have been reverted. It seems to happen with specific people/faces. Not sure if this issue is related.

To debug, I've checked Console app and filtered on "photoanalysis" and see that it tries running but often bails due to "thermalLevel >= 1". It decides not to proceed:

501:com.apple.photoanalysisd.backgroundanalysis:FA7A10:[

{name: ThermalPolicy, policyWeight: 1.000, response: {Decision: Must Not Proceed, Score: 0.00, Rationale: [{thermalLevel >= 1}]}}

], FinalDecision: Must Not Proceed}

So I assumed the CPU was running too hot, which forced photoanalysis to bail. So I unplugged my 5K monitor (which makes everything run HOT HOT HOT!) and closed all apps to go minimal in the hopes that it would allow photoanalysis to proceed. Occasionally I will see it proceed:

501:com.apple.photoanalysisd.backgroundanalysis:FA7A10:[

{name: DeviceActivityPolicy, policyWeight: 2.000, response: {Decision: Can Proceed, Score: 0.85}}

] sumScores:31.710000, denominator:32.010000, FinalDecision: Can Proceed FinalScore: 0.990628}

Even when it does run, it doesn't seem to do much. It runs for like 5-10 seconds and spews a bunch of debug lines into the Console, then appears to finish. But there is no indication in Photos.app of any progress at all. I've left my machine on for days/weeks, plugged into power, but nothing appears to be moving forward. Anyway, just wanted to "me too" here and see if everyone else could peek into their Console.app and see if they find anything interesting in there?

1 - should be either - personally I close the Photos Application - but keep the Mac powered and awake (it does not scan when asleep which you can set int the system preferences for energy)

2 - when I opened the People folder I could see the number scanned and see the progress - what are you seeing there?

3 - no - you can not speed things - but you can slow the down

They came up with three answers, during the same conversation, only regarding getting progress in scanning:

1 & 2 & 3 are all incorrect - it will scan both ways but just to be sure I personally always quit Photos - and the scan is a background process on your Mac

LN

Has anyone figured this out? I've had high sierra since it came out and still have the same message. I have tried the following: 1) Boot in safe mode in case something interfering : No go

2) Repair the library: this changes the message for a period of time. It will say there are 2715 photos left to scan. After a while, this message goes away, and the prior message occurs. If I repair the library again, still the same number of photos left to scan.

Also, any new people I have added to the library says: "updating <john>. People will finish updating when photos is in the background. " No photos of john are added.

This seems to be another unresolved question. When updating to High Sierra Photos my imac went on its merry way scanning faces presumably and got to having scanned 11,283 photos in a reasonable amount of time but no matter what I try now, it continues to display that it will continue scanning the remaining 14,567 photos.
Unfortunately, it's been displaying this for 3 days now. I turn photos off but nothing changes. When I turn it back on and go to 'people' it displays the same figures.

It could have been solved if there had been a manual option to scan the photos so you could control the process and know what the status was all the time. Maybe that will come in an update.

I believe what you are experiencing is similar to what I've been experiencing. I tried the upgrade 4 times now from a fresh start each time and this is the same result

1. 30%, in my case, 35 faces weren't upgraded

2. Same faces with each upgrade procedure

3. Tried adding some of those faces and the 'People' placed them at the bottom, not alphabetical and that's if Photos actually accepted them.

4. All photos seem to have been located as the total number is correct.

I've solved my personal issue by going back to iPhoto 9.6.1 which runs on High Sierra. When it upgraded the same 26,000 photos from my earlier version of iPhoto everything was correct, nothing missing. So I'm resigned, happily to this version of iPhoto. If there is any advantage in Photos editing then I'll just use it for that purpose but keep iPhoto 9.6.1

Seeing as I started this discussion I thought I'd better advise that I found the answer to the upgrade from my iPhotos to Photos issues.

Problem centres on the older version I have of iPhotos, iPhotos 9.2. When upgrading to Photos in High Sierra, Photos cannot deal properly with the older version of iPhoto 9.2. So I updated the 26,000 photos from iPhoto 9.2 to iPhoto 9.6.1 (also runs on High Sierra). Upgrade went fine, lost no people or photos. Then upgraded iPhoto 9.6.1 to Photos in High Sierra and the upgrade worked fine.

Summary, you can update from 9.6.1 to Photos on High Sierra but not iPhoto 9.2

Not so final after all. When the update was initially made to Photos it showed all 192 Faces the same as iPhoto but after 12 hours of photoanalysisd running it lost 34 faces from the initial upgrade. So I'm back to square one and Photos is hopeless in updating your iPhoto pictures. It appears that Photos ignores your previous face identification and re-categorizes the faces as it sees them not as you had previously identified them. It's a case of Photos saying it's smarter than you.

Bottom line Photos is dumped and I'll stay with iPhoto 9.6.1 which will run fine on High Sierra

I have seen the same massive delays in the People/Faces scanning. I was thrilled when it was announced that with Mac OS High Sierra and iOS 11 that all devices and computers would share keywords and People. About a week after the upgrades, I decided to replace my existing Photos library (about 4500 photos/videos from our collection) with my full library (a bit over 78000). They "merged" - I did manage to get rid of most of the duplicates - and now waiting somewhat patiently for the "scanning" to complete. None of the related devices that share the same Apple ID (two iMacs, two iPad Mini 4 and two iPhone 8) have completed the scanning. At least the iOS devices show how many photos have been scanned and how many are left (about 20% left). Neither Photos app on the iMacs show that type of number - only the message that Photos will complete the scan when it is running in the background.

The only way I can tell that something is happening is the external drive where the Photos library is stored is almost constantly being accessed.

My problem has never been with any delay as Photos does finish the scan. Unfortunately all for nothing as it never finds all the people that were identified on iPhoto. Hence lies the problem. Not only does it not find over 30% of the faces but the ones it does identify represent less than a quarter of the same person once identified on iPhoto. For example my wife is displayed 632 times on iPhoto but only 103 times after conversion to Photos.

All I can believe is that Photos identifies what it thinks are correct and all the other 'missing' photos are dropped by Photos as not being identifiable. Again it thinks it's smarter than I am in identifying faces.

I have a related problem. I have macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 and Photos 3.0. I have multiple Photos libraries and they are all on an external hard drive which is not connected to my Mac at all times. I do not use iCloud Photo Library at all. Since the very first version of Photos (1.0) my "People will finish updating when Photos is in the background" process is totally stuck on certain people and photos that were imported from iPhotos years ago. Hundreds and hundreds of photos that Photos will not process and recognize.

Surely there must be a way to blow out and reinitialize the People database and to get Photos to re-index everything from scratch. Isn't there? The "Repair Tool" process of launching Photos with Option-Command held down doesn't seem to have an effect on People indexing.

I have about the same problem. So very frustrating. Apple folks, when on earth are you going to get this fixed?

I don't use icloud - just want basic functionality back on my home computer.

There's no indication that any of the people that Photos is hanging on are actually being updated. As others have noted, there's no way to track any progress.

I had the same issue but had been told by Apple Support that the app must be closed to run ‘in the background’ and so I had been patiently waiting only opening it when I needed etc

Well after reading thw many confused replies on here I did a little test( I am only Level 1 so not skilled or pretending to be) but I used the activity log to monitor usage when photos was closed and when photos was minimized.... it seemed to like minimized this also corresponding with the activity on the external hard drive the photos are stored on. So I turned mac settings to never sleep turned off hard drive to sleep and left it on and minimized overnight. ITS FINISHED! I have 51000 photos so I didnt expect it to be fast but its unlikely it was a coincidence that it finally finished when left open but minimised overnight. Good luck to everyone else now I have a few thousand faces to name.

Most likely this is what changed the scan speed

So I turned mac settings to never sleep turned off hard drive to sleep

This was covered in the very first answer to this old thread

but keep the Mac powered and awake (it does not scan when asleep

LN