People will finish updating when Photos is in the background

I now have this message sitting there and no change for days.

Can you tell use where you are seeing this message? Photos may be showing it in two different places:

• If you are seeing this message directly when you are clicking the People album in the side bar and cannot access any people album, it really means that the faces scan has not finished and you have to find out, why Photos cannot access your photos to scan them.
• But if you are seeing the message at the bottom of the album for individual people, the message is misleading. Photos has finished the faces scan, but there are named people in your library, where Photos could not automatically recognize enough faces of this person. I am seeing this message all over the place in my People album. There are many people in the album, where I have only one photo of this person in my library and the resolution of these old family pictures is poor. The faces have been added manually. Photos is showing the message about "scanning ..." to indicate, that it needs more photos in better quality of these people, to be able to start the album. The problem is, that Photos needs at least one automatically detected face of a person. Any People album with only manually marked faces will show this warning .

Use of Photos is totally optional - since you find it do so difficult you should pick a program you do like and use it - free choice is a great thing but use it - no need to attack things you choose to use, just choose something different

BTW - Photos works great for millions and millions of people including several very experienced uses here -- if you decide that you want to fix your personal system and workflow issues post a rational question including details - RANT are unfixable and useless (and against the TOU) - give this a read before posting if you choose to fix things rather than just RANT - Writing an effective Apple Support Communities question

and no you can not go directly into the library - you can not wit any database program (Contacts, mail, etc., etc.) - when you choose to use a database you have to use the database program to work with it - again the solution is to not choose to use a database program

if you delete files directly from the directory via "show contents" it seems to corrupt the library and

That is correct. Since it sounds like you have been violating this firm rule that user error is very likely the source of all of your complaints - once you modify the library contents and corrupt the library it becomes unstable and unpredictable - normally the only solution to this major user error is to start over with a new library and stay out of it - there are no user serviceable parts in the library

LN

that does not preclude my right to criticise.

It does here - this is a user to user technical support forum and the TOU specifically forbid RANTs and limit post ot technical questions or positive suggestions

And additionally posting RANTS (your is) wastes time for you, the volunteers here and everyone else actually comes here looking for assistance and is a totally useless thing to do accomplishing nothing

once more time

if you decide that you want to fix your personal system and workflow issues post a rational question including details - RANT are unfixable and useless (and against the TOU) - give this a read before posting if you choose to fix things rather than just RANT - Writing an effective Apple Support Communities question

LN

you didn't mention how many photographs you have in the library.

It may work if you end all other apps you have open and let Photos run by itself.

In general - software developers only have a small database to test with -- so users with large databases are the ones who discover the problems.

In that case I would keep the option "View > Show face names" enabled, so you can unnamed faces when browsing your photos. When you come across a photo of a person, that is showing an unnamed faces circle, and the person is one of the people that are giving the alert, name this face manually by typing the name into the text field below the circle. The alert should vanish from below all albums, where you named a face, that has been detected automatically.

. I see that message when I click on People and scroll to the bottom of the People album,

This may mean that some photos still need scanning. Are you using iCloud Photo Library and optimize storage?