You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Updating faces has never stopped updating

Hi, for the last couple years apple Photos has been scanning people (faces) and has never ever stopped scanning... I don't even want to use the feature but there's no way of turning it off. When I highlight and remove everyone it just starts again!!


What is the minimum amount of people required in the people section? Or better yet, a way to tun the feature off entirely.


It's literally been scanning people for years now.


Latest macOS and Photos. Less than 30k photos.


Thanks!

Posted on Sep 8, 2020 9:30 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 16, 2020 11:01 AM

It is not possible to disable the faces scan. Photos needs the recognised faces for many services, for the memories, for search, for the automatic classification of objects and scenes. But Photos will only scan each photo once, directly after it has been added to your library. Ignore the People album and do not add any names.

Remove the people albums you do not want, but keep at least one album in the People album, or Photos will start over with the classification of faces.


Similar questions

5 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Sep 16, 2020 11:01 AM in response to saddact

It is not possible to disable the faces scan. Photos needs the recognised faces for many services, for the memories, for search, for the automatic classification of objects and scenes. But Photos will only scan each photo once, directly after it has been added to your library. Ignore the People album and do not add any names.

Remove the people albums you do not want, but keep at least one album in the People album, or Photos will start over with the classification of faces.


Sep 8, 2020 6:10 PM in response to saddact

As far as I know, you can't turn it off.


A People album of just one photo of a person will always say that it's still working on it but it will never complete because it's really just waiting for more photos of that person to be loaded. So it's more of a poorly worded message than anything else going on.


Really, you should just ignore the section if you're not going to use it. Deleting the contents may just cause it to re-evaluate the faces thus wasting computer resources.


And consider providing feedback to Apple about how you think it should (or shouldn't) work:


https://www.apple.com/feedback/photos.html

Sep 15, 2020 11:22 AM in response to PhillipU

The "People" album has never really worked. I spent hours manually tagging people in earlier iPhoto and Photos releases, and in Catalina / iOS 13, it all catastrophically wrong. Apparently, the key photos in the People album were causing syncing problems. So, I had to delete my entire People album anyway. Even when it existed, iOS couldn't search for People anyway. So, what was the point? The Photos situation on macOS and iOS is dumpster fire bad at this point. Syncing no longer works reliably from Finder.

Sep 15, 2020 11:58 AM in response to saddact

Where are you seeing the message about scanning for people? Is it below the main People album, or below the albums of some people?


Below the main People album the message about scanning for people should vanish after a few month, when all photos have been scanned. Each photo will only be scanned once on import, and again, if you retouch it.

But below the albums of individual people the message about "updating people" may remain forever. Photos will be waiting for at least a second photo of the same person, so it can learn what the person looks like. You have to name at least two photos of a person before the message will vanish. And if you only have one photo of a person, and never will meet this person again, the message will stay forever (unless you use brute force and duplicate the one photo you have).


Sep 16, 2020 8:21 AM in response to léonie

Hi, OK so if you click 'People' on the left of Photos it's on that drop page, so the page showing all different people it's identified.

It says 'Updating people.... People will finish updating when Photos is in the background'. It's been saying that for years.


I deleted everyone from the album but then it just started all over again by rescanning everything so now I have just 4 people listed.

I mean, I don't want the function at all, I've never once used it or required it. But there's no way to turn it off and I feel like it's constantly scanning and using my machines energy for something I don't even want!



Updating faces has never stopped updating

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.