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Tuesday, October 6th, 2009Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

iPhoto ‘09 Faces Spinning Forever

by Shawn @ 6:46 pm · filed under Tech Stuff

Someone I know uses iPhoto, but the Faces part of it wasn't working. New pictures wouldn't get scanned for faces and the spinning icon next to the Faces label on the navigation bar would just spin forever (and apparently it's always been stuck like that).

I Googled the issue, and came up with hundreds of people having the same problem, but no one seemed to figure out a solution.

After a lot of digging and poking around, I think I found the solution. She imported large folders into iPhoto from her old photo management application, and she had some movies in her photo folders. So this is how I fixed it...

  • Quit iPhoto first.

  • Then get into the guts of your iPhoto Library (right-click the iPhoto Library file in your Pictures folder and do "Show Package Contents").
  • Go to the Originals folder in there and get your movies out of there.
  • Delete the face.db and face_blob.db files.
  • Load iPhoto up and it will start scanning all your faces and with any luck actually get through them all and be kosher going forward.

    • Warning... this will delete all your face tags you had previously (so don't do it if you tagged a bunch of people manually and don't want to lose that).

6 Responses to “iPhoto ‘09 Faces Spinning Forever”

  1. Bulbboy Says:
    October 19th, 2009 at 11:33 am

    Now if you could only come up with a way to stop iPhoto from finding faces in walls, architecture, and folds of clothing.

    That creeps me out.

  2. Shawn Says:
    October 19th, 2009 at 12:55 pm

    It’s just ghosts in your pics, don’t worry about it.

  3. Mark Says:
    October 21st, 2009 at 1:34 pm

    I read here and in some other places the suggestion of removing the movies. But that seems to defeat one of the functionalities of the product, no? iPhoto is the place to store iPhone movies. I have many movies.

    That would be nuts for you to have to defeat one functionality (organize short low res iPhone movies) to utilize another (faces).

    I followed the rest of your instructions and it worked, even without removing movies. Thank you! We’ll see if having the movies causes Faces to choke.

    Thanks for your posting here.

  4. Shawn Says:
    October 21st, 2009 at 2:15 pm

    Storing iPhone Movies in iPhoto is news to me… iPhone movies reside in iTunes as far as I know.

  5. Mark Says:
    October 30th, 2009 at 9:40 am

    nope, iPhone syncs its movies with iPhoto not iTunes. You can edit the resync a movie into iTunes if you wish after the fact, but iPhoto is the default management for iPhone movies

  6. Shawn Says:
    October 30th, 2009 at 12:01 pm

    Oh… to be honest I never knew you could even store movies in iPhoto until now.

    Either way, the movies appear to be what’s screwing up the Faces thing, so… I can’t fix Apple’s bugs, only tell people what the bug is. :)

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