Photos not scanning faces

In my library photos has done the faces scan, when I minimized the Photos window in the Dock and did not interact with Photos. But I had to launch Photos at least once after starting up the Mac.

How are you checking the progress of the face recognition?

Have you enabled the option "Show Face names" in the View menu? If not, you Amy want to turn it on, at least until the faces scan has finished. This way you will be able to see all detected faces as an overlay on the photos. This way, you can see, if the face detection is not making any progress, or if the face recognition is stuck.

You may want to check, if photos has already circled the faces in the similar photos, and if yes, if perhaps the wrong name has been assigned. On rare occasions, Photos will merge the people albums of two people, and you may find the faces in a very different people album.

If the faces have been detected, but the person has not been recognized as an already named person, name more of the faces to add more photos to the training set for the face recognition. Look occasionally at the "Confirm additional faces" in the People albums of the people, where you know, that there are many faces in your library.

A common reason for Photos failing to fill in the missing names is, that it may have recognized the person as more than one person. There may be several albums for the same person that need merging. But the additional albums for the person may still be hidden.

Try to name a few faces from different years, so it will be more likely to encounter the faces that may be in other people albums with faces of the same person. If you name a face, but it does not turn up in the album for the person in the People album, click the faces icon in the Info for the photo to open the people album. In the people album scroll down to "Add to People Album" at the bottom of the album. This will add the hidden album to the people album as will, so you can merge the separate albums into one.

For example, in my library are several people in the People album, where the faces initially have been spread across multiple separate albums, or even merged with the wrong person by Photos.

Have all face you named been detected by Photos? Fotos cannot use the faces you circle manually, to learn what a person looks like. Only the faces that have been detected by Photos can be used for the face recognition.

I have a similar problem with Photos. I'm running: MacBook Pro i7 2017, MacOS Catalina 10.15.3, Photos v5.0 [131.17.170] Photo library is on the local drive with 16752 photos and 5585 videos. The 'iCloud Photos' option is off, 'My Photo Stream' is on and 'Shared Albums' is on. Photos fails to spot pictures of my wife and children. i.e. in a series of 3 or more pictures, where I've named individuals manually in one of the pictures, Photos fails or take a lot of time [weeks] to recognise the same person in very similar pictures. As mentioned above, when the Photos application says 'People will finish updating when Photos is in the background.' how to we get Photos to do 'updating'? Please let us know. Thanks

Are you always opening the library on the external volume in Photos, when you start up the Mac, so Photos will remember where to find the library? Is the external volume always connected? And not used for Time Machine backups?

Can you tell us a bit more about how you are using Photos, so we can compare your set-up to ours? Which version of Photos are you using? The most recent version Photos 5.0 on macOS 10.15.3 Catalina? Or an older version?

Are your photos stored locally or are you using iCloud Photos and "Optimize Mac Storage"?

A bottleneck for the faces scan could be iCloud. Photos needs access to the originals to scan them for faces. So it will be a lot slower, if you are using an optimized iCloud Photos Library.

Where is your Photos Library stored?

Thank you for the reply. I'm using the "Show Face names", as I add a lot manually as most faces are circled but not identified by Photos.

As mentioned above, the issue is speed of scanning and analysis. I name a few manually, even through the Photo library may have 19 years worth of that person's face, and wait days or weeks for Photos to recognise them and often it doesn't. I try the "Confirm additional faces" often but still get to the same situation; that is, a series of similar pictures, where a face is named in one or two but Photos fails to fill in the remaining similar pictures.

What I'm looking for is the best situation to leave Photos in so it can scans and analyses the pictures. So that ,once a month or so I can then "Confirm additional faces" and see the last few additions to the library, saving me the time of tagging them in each picture. It's also a little irritating that the faces page can't be re-listed in different ways [alpha/date/number].

Thanks

You have to combine photo libraries https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209528

See the articles https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT204414

https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/photos/phtad9d981ab/mac