Photodetection technology is widely used, especially near-infrared (NIR) photodetector plays an essential role in military, communication and industrial automation. With the development of semiconductor laser technology, multiband photodetectors (PDs) have great application prospects in imaging technology, environmental monitoring, medical detection, optical communication, and flexible equipment. The selective PDs of the NIR I-II region with a low pump threshold and a high sensitivity is investigated for developing polychromatic bioimaging/sensor encrypted communication in bioanalysis. Recent work on the NIR selective PDs mainly focus on integrating infrared semiconductor materials with different band gaps and NIR response capabilities as well as increasing the complexity and stability of the device design and cost. Rare-earth ions (RE3+) doped upconversion nanocrystals (UCNCs) can absorb the NIR photons and convert them into UV or Vis photons, then being absorbed by semiconductors with a wide band gap. The UCNCs have a large Stokes/anti-Stokes shift, a superior photostability, and a selective absorption at NIR wavelengths, thus considering as good narrowband NIR photoactive materials with a potential strategy for developing the new generation of NIR selective PDs. In UCNCs-based PDs, coupling with perovskite, graphene, or MoS2 enables the PDs to exhibit an excellent responsivity and achieve a wide spectral range that a single component cannot achieve. However, UCNCs-based PDs have some problems of low fluorescence efficiency and high pump threshold of UCNCs in practical application. This review summarized recent research on utilizing RE3+-doped UCNCs as photoactive materials for NIR PDs, and represented several primary strategies for enhancing UCL efficiency/intensity to achieve narrowband NIR PDs. Meanwhile, the advancement of combining UCNCs with perovskite, graphene, and MoS2 for the NIR PDs was described. In addition, recent work on RE3+-doped UC-perovskite NIR PDs was also given.