Photos crashes on search

[Morac]

I'm trying to search Photos on my MacBook Air M1 and it crashes fairly consistently when searching for either multiple categories, especially locations.

Simple searching for "Home" and choosing the Home with the house icon will just crash Photos. To search for Home I have to search for something like a person, then add Home, then remove the person. Sometimes that works, sometimes it crashes.

I can't reproduce these crashes on my iPhone.

Is anyone else have Mac Photos App crash when searching?


On a side note, the reason I found this was because I went to move a few albums I created into a Photos Folder. I then deleted the folder with the expectations that the albums wouldn't get deleted, but they were. I then tried to recreate the albums using search to find the photos since I knew all of them were taken at my Home in a certain date range, but searching for Home always crashed.

 

[KoolAid-Drink]

Not exactly the same (it doesn't crash when searching for "Home"), but it does crash when I do random search keywords. It seems to be random. It's annoying and has happened since at least macOS 12 (Monterey).

 

[Morac]

I called Apple support and they had me do a repair of the Photos Library. This appears to have effectively wiped out the search index as now search finds next to nothing. I’m not sure how long it will take to re-index all 10,000 photos and 900 videos, but it doesn’t seem to be have made much progress after 2 hours. I can’t search for locations or text and searching for people barely finds any results.

 

[gilby101]

but it doesn’t seem to be have made much progress after 2 hours.

See how it is going after running overnight.

 

[Morac]

See how it is going after running overnight.

It says it’s still indexing, though I was able to find everything I tried searching for so I’m not sure what it’s actually indexing at this point. Maybe it’s doing the videos. Apple got rid of the progress bar that showed up when indexing in MacOS 15 so I don’t know how much is left.

The good news is it’s not crashing when I search for things. I could search for “Home” which immediately crashed it previously. I didn’t play with it for long as I want it to finish indexing.

 

[Morac]

It’s still not crashing, but it’s also still indexing.

I’ve found I can search for almost anything and it will find photos with a few exceptions. Searching for landmarks isn’t working. For example I have a picture of the Eiffel Tower, but searching for that returns no results while my iPhone and iPad do.

Beyond that searching for people and text works, even in videos. I’m not sure how much longer it will need to index or what it is even indexing at this point.

 

[Morac]

Still indexing according to the Photos app. I still can’t search for landmarks, but at least it’s not crashing.

I checked the console logs and the mediaanalysis process is spitting out tens of thousands of errors. Most of them say “Failed to load Scene Taxonomy for analysis version”. I don’t know what that means but it’s being spit out thousands of times.