"updating people..." people will finish updating when photos is in the background. Indefinitely

I did some tests because Big Sur 11.2.2 Photos.app 6.0 does not automatically scan faces in my mac Mini 2018 with internal SSD like it in Mojave used to do.

(Workflow in detail: I Option-launched Photos and made a new Photos library at the default ~/Pictures with the default "Photos Library.photoslibrary" name, set it as System library and imported 622 .jpg (and a few .heic and .png) images to a newly made album for those images. I let Photos be in the foreground and in the background up to 1 hour, rebooted, cold rebooted, waited until the next day, cold rebooted, and again let it sit there with those options. Zero scanned faces. I then re-did all that but imported straight to a library without making an album. I then also enabled iCloud photos and again let it idle for hours. I then manually added faces one-by-one but the automatic face recognition never started. I have just a few installed Apple and 3rd party apps (FCP, Compressor, VMware, GraphicConverter, BBEdit, LibreOffice, Dropbox usually OFF, Carbon Copy Cloner, Spotify, MacPorts, exiftool), no virus apps or "cleaners".)

Result: "0 Photos Scanned" in the Mac's Photos library:

Then I enabled iCloud photos also in an iPad Pro and there those iCloud photos were readily scanned for faces. Then those faces were synced to the Mac's People > View People Album. But the Mac never started to scan the faces itself:

I manually added two clearly visible faces of the same person (the only person in those photos, name is in my Contacts) but the automatic face recognition does not seem to start after waiting for two hours (Photos open in the background or quit, rebooted while the external drive holding the library was ON). photolibraryd did again wake up for a few minutes but the faces were still intact.

What also bothers me that when manually adding faces, the circle is not placed on the face, but just somewhere on that person. And when opening the People album (containing just those manually added two photos), and then clicking "Faces" in the upper-right corner, only the person's chin or chest is shown -- in Mojave this zoomed into the person's face. Should I manually also move the circle or is face recognition somehow broken in my setup?

I have not resolved the issue with missing faces. I am still hoping that it might be fixed in some Big Sur update. It is a brand new Photos library in a cleanly installed Big Sur with about 40 000 images and movies then imported to it (importing those takes a while so I have not yet tried to re-do it). As an old habit I created it at /Users/Shared so rest of the family could also view it. But apparently that does not properly work in Big Sur anymore because if another user opens it, the library must be repaired. So that might play a role in the failure (I also do not use iCloud for photos -- oh so many variables for troubleshooting). But I created a small test library in the default ~/Pictures (on an external Big Sur disk while booted from it) and the faces were not updated in there either. I'll try this small test later on my main internal disk (the main library is on an external disk now). My main backup image and movie archive is in plain folders on external disks so this is not a big issue for me although sometimes it was nice to view the People album in Mojave where this still worked (although the automatic faces were sometimes incorrect and I did not bother to fix them anymore lately). I am glad to hear that you could move the old iTunes to the new Music.app.

I made a test two days ago on macOS 10.11 Big Sur with two very small new Photos Libraries. After waiting a full day the People album has still been showing "0 People scanned". in both new libraries. After I opened one photo with a clearly visible face and marked the face manually and added it to the People album, the faces scan started, and a few hours later it has been complete.

Thanks for the note. I'll re-try the manual kick-start in my main Photos library. In that test library it did not work but perhaps I was too impatient although I did wait at least 2-3 hours and checked the Activity Monitor if the photolibraryd was active.

> when manually adding faces, the circle is not placed on the face, but just somewhere on that person

I made another attempt by manually adding a few faces and manually put the circle on the face (I guess that is the the correct workflow in manual mode?). But the automatic face recognition does not start anyway and no additional faces for that person were found either in Big Sur. On the other hand in a Mojave test disk this continues to work OK.

My small test libraries have been in a second volume on the system drive. One library with referenced photos, one library managed. Only 20 photos in each library. None of the libraries has been the system photo library. So no syncing could have taken place. After two days the faces had been scanned in both libraries. I am always launching Photos right after logging into my account to kick off the background processes and are restarting the Mac frequently just in case the background processes should have crashed.

I have the same problem. For some people it works. Do you have the library in its default ~/Pictures folder? Is it a new library created in Big Sur or an old library created in some older macOS?