When I enter a search item in Photos, then I see: indexing…. But does this process ever stop? I have kept the app open for more than 24 hours, still indexing. I have 12.000 photos/pictures in my library.
iMac (M1, 2021)
To add to Yer_Man's reply the indexing includes identifying objects, like autos, chairs, tables, lamps, etc., people and animals, plants and trees. That's a lot of AI to do. Photos also examines each frame of a video for those same items. That's time consuming.
Some users have reported that with the size of their libraries it took over a week to complete. As Richard said, keep Photos open in in the background and leave your Mac on at night, not sleeping but with the screensaver turning off the monitor after a given number of minutes.
To add to Yer_Man's reply the indexing includes identifying objects, like autos, chairs, tables, lamps, etc., people and animals, plants and trees. That's a lot of AI to do. Photos also examines each frame of a video for those same items. That's time consuming.
Some users have reported that with the size of their libraries it took over a week to complete. As Richard said, keep Photos open in in the background and leave your Mac on at night, not sleeping but with the screensaver turning off the monitor after a given number of minutes.
Photos will avoid slowing you down by scanning and indexing while you're using it, so you need to convince Photos that it's not being used. I'm not sure that it is clear that being open is important, but I keep Photos open and in the background-- that is, running but with another app in front.
The time taken to index the Library is basically the square root of the length of a piece of string. Or put another way there are a lot of variables and some talking back to Apple servers. So while 12k photos is not a large library it can take several days. As the recent update to the OS may also have triggered indexing of a lot of other libraries you could be caught in a queue.
Other possibilities? Is the library on an external? IF so what format is that?
The indexing is done by the background processes launched by Photos.
Launch Photos once, after you have logged into your user account. Then you can keep Photos running in the background or even quit it. It should not matter.
Sometimes it can happen, that one of the background processes is quitting unexpectedly.
When in doubt, if the indexing is proceeding as it should, it could help to log off and on again, then to launch Photos again, to ensure that the background processes are running.
Keep the app running.
It is a normal internal library. But should I keep the Photo app open, or is the indexing in the background?
Indexing Photos on Mac: always?
