Windows Photos App face tagging

Question

The Windows 10 Photos App automatically tags faces in photos. It puts the results of these efforts in the People tab:

Recently I imported 50 or so photos and when I checked a day later about half of them were tagged. Since then I imported a few thousand more, yet the face tagging has not updated at all, it just seems to have given up.

Is there any way to prompt the app to tag a few more photos, or anything I can do to encourage it?

NB I've seen various places where I'm told to turn on the appropriate setting, but it's been on all this time

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Specs:

Microsoft Photos: 2018.18051.17710.0

OS Name: Microsoft Windows 10 Home

Version: 10.0.17134 Build 17134

Answer 1

It sounds like the index became corrupt for whatever reason, and whilst new photos will show in the stream, they don't appear to be indexed.

One (extreme) workaround, is to delete the database file at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.Photos_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\MediaDb.v1.sqlite - it is an extreme approach, but from the next time you load the Photos app, it will restart scanning for photos, and then doing the facial recognition on them.

If you're lucky, it will successfully re-index your entire collection, and then it will pick up files as you add them.