When we upgrade a major iOS, or macOS, it’s typical to observe a slow down for a few hours, or maybe a day, while new functionality “indexes”.
But I’ve been using this new iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18 for 2 weeks now. And yet, every time I try to do even a search syntax that worked under iOS 17, like the one shown, it gives me this message that it’s busy “indexing your library…”
What it feels like is that it’s not doing any indexing until I search for something, but that may be just because it only shows that message after I hit search.
I know I have 120,000 photos in my library, but it still seems absurd. I’m assuming none of this indexing can happen in the cloud or else it should have been done weeks ago. But even indexing on my device, it has had many sleeping hours to work on this. And the device never feels warm or runs down the battery.
So I’m not sure if it’s working and just needs more time? But meanwhile, I’ve had a phone with broken search for weeks. Maybe someday I’ll be able to benefit from the awesome new search features… but that time hasn’t come yet.
Just noting that my iOS 18 Photo library (28,620 items, yeesh) has finished its index and is pretty good at finding certain kinds of search (common nouns, people in my family, etc.)
I have restarted my iPhone (13 Pro) for another reason, have you tried that option yet?
I can search for things and get results but it does have the same indexing note on the bottom. But there are search terms which give no results (“shots from an airplane” - I thought I had a few) and it has the same result as yours, with the same note on the bottom about indexing.
I tried the failed search in Photos for Mac and had the same no result - it also says that it is still indexing.
Searching for “Aurora” yields 15 results on iOS, 12 results on MacOS. Searching (this one was suggested on the iPhone) for a local town in summer results in 97 on iOS, 51 on MacOS.
I think that Apple has stated before that indexing is always done on each device and is not synced via iCloud.
I think that indexing continues for a long time, though, because I recall when duplicate detection was introduced I went in to take care of them, and when I went in to duplicates again many months later there were more found.
Yes I was pretty sure I had also heard this about Photos indexing. Never seen it take this long. Perhaps they slowed it down in favor of people’s phones not heating up.
Yes I have seen duplicates take a while to be detected.
Might be nice to at least get a progress indicator, especially for an operation that might take an entire month at this rate. I certainly can’t evaluate the new feature in this situation.
When you search, even if you get results (which I sometimes do), does it show the indexing message (which I always do)?
While you do have an extremely large photo library, it sounds to me like something is wrong. It’s stuck and won’t ever finish. I wonder if there’s a way to toggle off that indexing and restart it from scratch? Maybe temporarily logging out of iCloud, but that could be a bit drastic.
I also seem to recall some issue a few years back where certain “bad” (corrupt) pictures would cause problems with a Photo library. Deleting those photos solved the problem, but it was tricky finding them. Could be something similar going on in your case where the indexing goes until it hits that bad photo and gets stuck. You might have to check with Apple Support and see if there’s a scan they can do on their end to find the problem.
I’ve seen this too; good memory. And I think it’s entirely possible you’re right.
And @ddmiller 's comparison of search results on his iPhone vs. Mac supports the understanding that indexing is done on-device (otherwise, the two should both draw from the same source of truth in the cloud, and match; and I’m not running Sequoia yet, so I can’t do that comparison).
Yea, this may turn out to be another Apple Support issue.
Back in July, I had another Photos issue, apparently related to RAW files, that I discussed here and then opened an Apple issue on. The support rep captured detail and promised me follow up, which I never got. However, the problem has since gone away. And based on the nature of the problem, I now think the problem may have resided in iCloud itself, and so maybe their engineers fixed it there silently. It doesn’t sound like the current issue can be fixed on the back end, though.
Photos is also designed so that the face recognition and scene and object detection — which power features like For You, Memories, Sharing Suggestions, and the People album — happen on device instead of in the cloud. In fact, the A13 Bionic and later chips perform over 100 billion operations per photo to recognize faces and places without ever leaving your device.
He said that the sledgehammer required to restart Photos indexing on iPhone is to “Reset All Settings”. So I just did that. Photos is now again indexing, and we’ll see in a day or two if it’s still running or if it works successfully this time…
Well, almost a week has passed and nothing has improved (and meanwhile I’m STILL trying to get my settings back to how they should be after the “Reset All Settings” Apple forced me to do).
So I just got off with Apple Support again, and they took diagnostics off my iPhone to send to the engineers. Let’s see what they find…
Wrapping up a call with Apple Support now. The short version is that it seems that it is (at least now) a known issue that is affecting other customers.
That’s always good news, because it means we’re beyond the point where I need to supply data, and now they have found a flaw in their technology. When it gets fixed is unknown. iOS 11.1? But since photos indexing happens on the phone, they probably have to push an iOS update to fix it. I will have to try to pay attention to see if the problem gets fixed in conjunction with an update…
Same Indexing message, no surprise. Search working, mostly.
Weird bug - if I type in “AL” in the search box Photos immediately quits and I am returned to my Home Screen. Tried several times, always the same, even after restarting my iPhone. Typing “am” no problem. Typing “AM”, backspace, and then “L” is fine. Not case sensitive.
It’s unclear if the first problem is gone and now I have a new problem? Or the original issue has now been re-branded into what Apple thinks (and I would agree) is a more meaningful message? Or if I now have two separate things going on, but the newer one is masking the old one, because there’s only room on the screen for one status message at a time.
Apparently my 2nd theory is correct. Apple Support replied and said:
The message in the screenshot you provided says “Photos (application) organizes photos and videos when iPhone is locked and connected to Wi-Fi.” This means that the photos are being indexed. Same process, just different wording.
Their engineering team has no updates yet, but I asked him to pass along my update to them.
FWIW mine has the same message when I do a search term, now more than a month after I first installed 18. It’s been plugged in and on WiFi plenty. (But my search results appear to be pretty complete.)
