Face scan recognition limits?

OneDrive’s face tagging and automatic photo recognition is a bit… quirky, especially with large libraries.

What you can do

Option A: Wait / incremental upload

• Microsoft may resume scanning gradually if you keep uploading new photos.
• For very old photos, you could re-upload them in smaller batches, which sometimes triggers re-processing.

Option B: Use local software for face tagging

• If OneDrive’s recognition won’t finish, consider doing face tagging locally with a program like:
• Windows Photos app (has facial recognition for local files)
• Adobe Lightroom
• Apple Photos
• Once tagged locally, you can sync the tagged photos back to OneDrive, though the tags may not appear in OneDrive’s gallery; they remain in metadata.

Option C: Accept that OneDrive’s recognition is limited

• Unfortunately, OneDrive doesn’t let users “force” it to scan older photos.
• Many users with 10,000+ photos simply treat OneDrive’s face tagging as a best-effort service, not a full replacement for local photo management software.

OneDrive has internal limits for photo analysis

• OneDrive doesn’t scan every single photo indefinitely. Microsoft intentionally throttles the face recognition and metadata processing to avoid overloading their servers.
• For large libraries (thousands of images), it often stops scanning older photos and may only prioritize more recent uploads.
• In practice, many users see exactly what you describe: it gets partway through their library, then effectively pauses indefinitely.

Bottom line: This is not a bug, it’s by design. Large photo libraries will hit scanning and recognition limits, especially with older photos. Manual “teach me” style tagging is mostly gone. For full control over faces in your library, you’ll likely need local software.

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Hope this will help you.

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