I have been dealing with my photo library never getting processed for facial (people) recognition & identification. I'm running a Macbook Pro 2019 (currently Ventura 13.0, Photos 8.0), 6 core Intel processor and Radeon Pro GPU - lots of processing power available to do the job. All my photos are on my local SSD, not external. This has been occurring both in Monterrey as well as when I upgraded to Ventura. Apple keeps most of the photos process undocumented so it's a major pain to figure out what's happening...or why nothing is happening.
I know the "photoanalysisd" process/engine is the primary analysis tool for all this kind of work. Regardless of what I do, it never generates any significant CPU time (more than a few seconds over a weekend) as shown by Activity Monitor.
I've tried lots of suggestions like:
- Repairing my Photos library;
- Resetting the faces database by deleting all the people in the "People" folder in Photos;
- Disconnecting from iCloud Photos so everything is local;
- Disabling all user-level background processes;
- Seeding a couple of hundred photos with manual face tagging;
- Rebooting the system with nothing else running, starting photos and then closing the app, confirming photoanalysisd was launched, letting it sit over the weekend, and ensuring the Mac never went to sleep while being plugged into power (this seems to help a lot of people);
- Going "scorched earth" - Exporting all photos, deleting the old library and re-importing them to build a brand-new library;
- Opening a support case with Apple and working it all the way up to level 4 support;
- and lots of other attempts.
Bottom line, photoanalysisd hasn't accumulated any significant processing time, and no faces are even being detected, much less being identified or curated.
So how can I trigger face detection?