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Every time I tag a bunch of faces and click "Done", iPhoto starts to rescan all the photos with uncomfirmed faces.

I assume this is happening because CPU usage by iPhoto jumps to ~99% and all the probably matches for each person disappear. I also see the spinning "busy" icon in the possible matches sections at this point.

Is that indeed what is occurring? If so, how can I stop it from redoing the scan? It's kind of inconvenient because I have ~10k photos and all the suggested face matches can go away after I only tag 20 photos or so.

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Yes, there (sort of) is. Stop iPhoto application.

as root: cd into your Pictures/iPhoto Library

then remove both face.db and face_blob.db

then make both of these links to /dev/null

when finished, it should look like this:

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root robertm 9 Apr 25 01:59 face.db -> /dev/null
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root robertm 9 Apr 25 02:00 face_blob.db -> /dev/null

This effectively stops faces from keeping any database's. (Warning: it still "tries" to run just after an import of a fresh set of photos, just stop/restart iPhoto after an import to get your precious CPU back).

The good thing is: No more database of people and where/when you last saw them on your HD. Restart iPhoto. (no more faces, no more CPU / Drive consumption either). You may want to do a find . | grep face and look at all the little jpg's with the "face" in the name you might want to get rid of as well. (you won't need them now, as they are quite useless to the program after doing this).

Forum Discussions

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  • Comment from Mike moffit: "Alexander, thanks for the answer. Is there a way you could tell a layperson like me how to do it, as I don't understand some of the technical language. I found face.db and face_blob.db in the iPhoto Library, but after that I don't understand your instructions."
    – Gnoupi
    Aug 26, 2010 at 7:22

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