SOLVED Photos not scanning people in Monterey OS 12.1

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Since the upgrade to Monterey OS - my Photos has not scanned/processed any face recognition. Regardless of all the forum advice, I continue to get the message "0 Photos Scanned - Photos will continue scanning your remaining 70,524 photos when you're not using the app and your Mac is connected to power."

I am running Monterey OS 12.1. I have turned off the power saving feature. I have both quit Photos and left it running overnight - and had Photos open-but minimized and left running overnight. Nothing happens. I have also gone to Activity Monitor - searched for photoanalysisd and force quit that - and repeated leaving things over night. No progress.

Any other ideas? This is on a iMac Pro.
I just did a ton of troubleshooting and came up with a fix for my situation - check it out and see if it applies to you. :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplePhotos/comments/ysj149
 
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I have tried for years now. My photo library is an external hard drive. Nothing works. 0 photos of 78.000 scanned. No matter what I do it doesn't begin to scan. Running Ventura 13 on an M1 MacBook Air. So frustrated. Please help me
 
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I just looked at Photos and how do you scan for faces? I looked at every menu option and couldn't find anything. Is it supposed to be automatic? Ventura 13.2 on an Intel MacBook Pro (2019). I have faces in my "People" category but I can't see any way to run a manual scan.
 
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I just looked at Photos and how do you scan for faces? I looked at every menu option and couldn't find anything. Is it supposed to be automatic? Ventura 13.2 on an Intel MacBook Pro (2019). I have faces in my "People" category but I can't see any way to run a manual scan.
It is an automatic process; you can't get it to stop/start manually. The key process is "photoanalysisd", and the only way to at least launch that process is to open Photos.

Here's the best way I've found to get it to work:
- Make sure to setup your system so that it doesn't go to sleep (change this back once things have processed to where you want it).
- Reboot your system, and do what you can to not have any other programs running in the background or open.
- *If you've got an external monitor plugged in, unplug it!* See above - that's what screwed with me for months.
- Open, and then close, Photos. That will launch the photoanalysisd process, and it will continue to run after Photos is closed. Also, Photoanalysisd doesn't seem to run if the Photos app is open.
- Walk away (hopefully overnight) to let your system be at idle. Photoanalysisd should start running itself after a few minutes. For me, that was about 5 minutes.
- Come back the next day and check Activity Monitor to see if there's any significant time (like, more than 15-30 seconds) in the "CPU Time" column. If so, it's actually working.

Note - for me, it took a couple of days of Photoanalysisd chugging away before it started showing anything other than "0 photos of XXX" and the processed photos number started incrementing. As long as that CPU time is incrementing significantly, it's working - it just takes a while for a photo to be completely processed, and maybe multiple passes through your collection.
 
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I think since my external drive is directly connected it to my MacBook it triggers the same blockage as the external monitor. So I guess I need to buy a wireless drive. It sucks!
 
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Interesting that I do not have this issue. I can only assume it is because my photos library is relatively small and I keep my photos exclusively in iCloud with the library stored locally - assuming as I add to it from my phone or one of my systems, the local library gets updated as they are all in sync. I only have about 7k photos and about 23 faces I have identified. photoanalysisd is running.
 
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I think since my external drive is directly connected it to my MacBook it triggers the same blockage as the external monitor. So I guess I need to buy a wireless drive. It sucks!
It might be the same thing? If you're willing to roll up your sleeves on this one to get more information about why it's choosing not to run:
  1. Go through the process I talked about above to reboot your machine, it's not going to sleep, and make sure you've got no running applications.
  2. Open and close Photos
  3. Launch Activity Monitor to find the PID of the photoanalysisd process. Close Activity Monitor.
  4. Open the terminal, and use this command to see if you can catch it's logic as to why it's not running (replace the pid# with the number you found from step #3):

    log stream --level debug -p pid# |grep Decision > photos.log

  5. Let that run overnight. When you come back in the morning, open up that "photos.log" file, and it should (hopefully?) have information in there about why photoanalysisd is deciding not to run.
I'm curious as to what you find!
 

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