Forum Discussion
Face scan recognition limits?
I was a big fan of adding name tags in photos before, and was eager to have it back. Problem is, I have quite a large number of photos, and onedrive just stopped scanning, being very far from finishing the job. I mean, considering for example the pictures my spouse appears in, one drive started recognizing her in the most ancient photos quite nicely, but stopped somewhere in 2006, and than added just a dozen from the most recent pictures.
Yes, I keep taking photos of her meanwhile.
Unfortunately it didn't accept help from me, like hey look here, this is a face, and is the face of this person.
Any idea if this is just temporary?
1 Reply
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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