Photos Error: People will finish updating when Photos is in the background

Greetings, djbikowski.

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities. We can understand why you’d want to resolve the error message in Photos that you’ve seen for over a year. Let's start by following the guide below, to ensure everything is updated and working as expected.

Get help with the Photos app on your Mac

Sincerely.

It took two months in my setup and during the first month it slowly updated only Memories. But one year is extreme.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252734182

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252580000

"People will finish updating when Photos is in the background".

This is not an error message but a perfectly normal status message. You will see it usually after a system upgrade or after importing a lot of new photos.

Just to be sure, which message about updating you are referring to:

There are two places in "People" where you could see a status message about "updating ...".

• At the bottom of the main People album: Here you should be seeing also the number of photos already scanned. If no number is given and you are already seeing a few albums for individual people, the initial scan has been completed and Photos is updating individual people.
• Below the individual album of a certain person: Some albums for certain People may still need completing, because there is only one photo of the person, so Photos cannot start to learn what the person looks like.

Are you seeing the "updating" message at the bottom of the main People album? If yes, are there already any albums for individual people shown or is the People album completely empty? Does this message include the number of photos scanned?

If you should be seeing this message below a few individual People albums, you may need to provide more photos of the same person, so Photos can complete the setup of the People album for this person. Photos needs more than one photo of a person to finish the set-up of the album for this person.