Faces step during iPhoto library rebuild: how long is too long?

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Faces step during iPhoto library rebuild: how long is too long?

Because of sync issues I decided to bite the bullet and rebuild the iPhoto library I use to sync photos to my iOS devices. This library has about 14,000 photos, and so far we're at about 4 or 5 hours of a message box saying "Rebuilding Photo Library: Rebuilding library: restoring faces".

How long is reasonable for this process to continue before using force quit to abort?

And bleep to apple for not making it optional, since faces has ZERO value for the 99.95 percent of these photos that are not of people....

MacBook Pro, macOS High Sierra (10.13.6)

Posted on Aug 25, 2018 4:04 PM

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Answer 1

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Donot Haveone Author

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106 points

Aug 26, 2018 11:17 AM in response to Yer_Man

That's helpful to know that 24 hours is reasonable. I can set that up for another day, if I can't fix the issue another way. I just couldn't let it go indefinitely on a process I don't want or need without any ballpark estimate of what's reasonable. Thanks!

I was trying to get at this problem when I did the rebuild and ran off the rails, and I've posted a question in iTunes about it (not sure if it should be in iPhoto or iTunes, that communities separation is always so vague when dealing with the in-betweens like this): iTunes shows and syncs the wrong number of photos from many of my iPhoto albums to the iPhone--only a portion of them are coming over from many of my albums in this library.

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Answer 2

Donot Haveone Author

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106 points

Aug 25, 2018 4:15 PM in response to Donot Haveone

D'Oh, should have mentioned that.

iPhoto 9.6.1. Definitely not Photos; I have not converted my dozens of iPhoto libraries to Photos because I don't want to invest the time if I'm not going to be using it long term (too long to go into why that is right now). Just the question about the photos.

If this matters, they're all jpegs 900x1440 pixels (customized for screensave/desktop/slideshow on this MBP).

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Answer 3

Donot Haveone Author

Level 1

106 points

Aug 26, 2018 10:26 AM in response to Donot Haveone

Gave up after 10 hours; oddly enough, Activity Monitor did not ever show iPhoto as 'not responding' through that whole time. I had to use the power button to turn it off because force quit did not work, and replaced the library with a backup copy. I'll have to work on the backup copy a bit to bring it up to speed, but still have that question, in case I need to do this again in the future: how long is reasonable to allow iPhoto to 'recover faces' in rebuilding a large library?

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Answer 4

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,338 points

Aug 26, 2018 11:18 AM in response to Donot Haveone

How long is a piece of string, really. 14k is not a lot of photos, but it really depends on the nature of the images (for instance, pics of crowds or individual portraits), the quality of the images and the power of the machine. Frankly, tho, it being no speed demon, I would have given that 24 hours anyway. But there are too many variables to form a guesstimate...

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