People will finish updating when Photos is in the background.

Question

Krakow Author

Level 1

9 points

People will finish updating when Photos is in the background.

macOS Catalina Version 10.15.5

iMac (27-inch, late 2012)

Processor 3.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7

Memory 32 GB 1600 MHZ DDR3

Photos on my iMac has been open for several days.

Photos has
- 36,000 photos
- 1,300 videos (Twelve videos are 2-4 hours long each. The rest are less than 1 minute long each.)

This is the message (I have 142 People; only Otis is affected).

This is the activity monitor

These are the Energy Saver settings in preference I set

Questions:

Will it take several weeks or months for Otis to finish updating?
Is there an issue that I need to resolve?

iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jul 21, 2020 9:14 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

197,297 points

Jul 21, 2020 10:37 PM in response to Krakow

How many photos do you have of Otis?

The message about updating people may never vanish, if you have only one photo of the person and Photos could not detect the face auto magically. Photos needs at least two photos of the person to be able to learn what the face looks like. I can make the "updating Mickey Mouse" go away below the album of the person, if I import an additional photo of the person, or duplicate the existing photo and edit it slightly. But it is not worth the trouble.

Are all videos in your Photos Library compatible with Photos 5 on Catalina? Some older video formats can no longer be processed, and incompatible, older videos might be blocking the face recognition.

This list of legacy video codecs (written for iMovie) might help you to find videos that might need converting to a compatible format: About incompatible media in iMovie for macOS - Apple Support

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Answer 2

Krakow Author

Level 1

9 points

Jul 26, 2020 4:04 PM in response to léonie

Although I have many photos of Otis, I had manually assigned face recognition to only one photo of him. That is what caused the pesky message “People will finish updating when Photos is in the background”. I got rid of this pesky message by selecting several additional photos of Otis and manually assigning face recognition to them, too.

This actually resulted in two instances of “Otis” in the People album. But no problem! This was easily resolved. I simply merged the two instances of Otis into one. Here’s what I did:

Clicked on the People album.
Found the two instances of Otis and control-clicked on both of them.
Right-clicked on one of the instances.
Next, a dialog box appeared: “Merge People - Are these the same persons? Yes / No”
I clicked “Yes”. Voila! Only one instance of Otis remained! Yeah!

So now when I click on Otis in the People album, the pesky message “People will finish updating when Photos is in the background” no longer appears because there is now more than one photo of Otis that has his face recognized.

Thank you!

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