iPhoto, Faces, circling arrows forever

macabouttobe · Oct 30, 2009, 10:40 PM

I have iLive 09, recently upgraded from 08. I thought I'd play around with Faces, so I tagged about a dozen or so pics of my son's face.

It has been stuck on "KID may also be on the photos below" with the two spinning arrows for about a day. I see my CPU is running heavy the entire time on Activity Monitor with Iphoto taking most of the clicks.

How long does this usually take? or is this stuck in some bizarre loop and I'd best re-install iPhoto.. Going to let it run for another night (hope it doesn't get TOO hot!!) So hopefully someone can help share their experiences.

I have about 13K photos when I select all and it gives me a count. That may be part of the issue...

Thanks in advance!!

JediMeister · Oct 31, 2009, 03:55 AM

Well, it probably has something to do with the sheer number of photos in the library, there's no good estimate I can offer as to the estimated time of completion...However if the system never finishes it's scan of the library, you can nuke the files generated by the Faces scan by going to ~/Pictures, right/control clicking the iPhoto Library and selecting Show Package Contents, and removing the face.db and face_blob.db files from within there, and relaunching iPhoto. Make sure that you have quit out of iPhoto before you makes changes to the iPhoto Library in such a fashion. Removing those two files tells iPhoto to restart the process of identifying faces in the photographs, regardless of whether you have tagged anyone in your library.

mrscribble · Nov 5, 2009, 02:46 AM

Hopefully JediMeister's suggestion will work for you; if not you may unfortunately need to join the growing number of unhappy iPhoto users over at

http://discussions.apple.com/thread....readID=2123582

Faces has never worked for me & I no longer use iPhoto because of the CPU load issue.

Oct 30, 2009, 10:40 PM	#1
macabouttobe macrumors member Join Date: Aug 2007	iPhoto, Faces, circling arrows forever I have iLive 09, recently upgraded from 08. I thought I'd play around with Faces, so I tagged about a dozen or so pics of my son's face. It has been stuck on "KID may also be on the photos below" with the two spinning arrows for about a day. I see my CPU is running heavy the entire time on Activity Monitor with Iphoto taking most of the clicks. How long does this usually take? or is this stuck in some bizarre loop and I'd best re-install iPhoto.. Going to let it run for another night (hope it doesn't get TOO hot!!) So hopefully someone can help share their experiences. I have about 13K photos when I select all and it gives me a count. That may be part of the issue... Thanks in advance!! __________________ iMac 2.8, 24",500gb HD,3GB Ram 8 Gig iPhone 3g

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Oct 31, 2009, 03:55 AM	#2
JediMeister macrumors 68000 Join Date: Oct 2008	Well, it probably has something to do with the sheer number of photos in the library, there's no good estimate I can offer as to the estimated time of completion...However if the system never finishes it's scan of the library, you can nuke the files generated by the Faces scan by going to ~/Pictures, right/control clicking the iPhoto Library and selecting Show Package Contents, and removing the face.db and face_blob.db files from within there, and relaunching iPhoto. Make sure that you have quit out of iPhoto before you makes changes to the iPhoto Library in such a fashion. Removing those two files tells iPhoto to restart the process of identifying faces in the photographs, regardless of whether you have tagged anyone in your library.

Nov 5, 2009, 02:46 AM	#3
mrscribble macrumors newbie Join Date: Dec 2004	Hopefully JediMeister's suggestion will work for you; if not you may unfortunately need to join the growing number of unhappy iPhoto users over at http://discussions.apple.com/thread....readID=2123582 Faces has never worked for me & I no longer use iPhoto because of the CPU load issue.