iOS 13 Photos - Background Activity High Battery Usage

Thanks for the update. What the ****? I was thinking about deleting some of my 22.000 photos but when I see that you’re having the same struggle with 1.500 I might overthink this idea.

Apple, what the ****?!

Some updates!!

So I deleted all my photos on my phone AGAIN, after using it over half month, the background activity is not showing up, not overheating!

Interesting thing is before I deleted all the photos, I backed them up in icloud, and my iPad mini has icloud photo on, so my iPad mini is draining battery a lot faster than usual(not overheating because I'm not using it at all), using 82% of the battery in the last 10days. Then I deleted them all and turned off the icloud photo. ALL GOOD!

THEN, today I enabled icloud photo on my Mac Mini, it gets hot and the "photolibraryd" process thing is using 90% CPU and over 80% energy. I searched online and found lots of people complained it too.

So my conclusion is somehow my photo files don't get along with the photo app........when I going through my photos I find some photos have really long weird name like 50 characters...compare to normal ones [IMG12345], most of them are saved by some photo editing apps. So I went through ALL photos deleted all long name images, and turn off mac mini and turn on again. After 2 hours, it works fine! not hot, no photo background activity!

I'm not sure if this is the solution, I haven't try it on phone or iPad yet. But just let you know!

@sheepcc - Thank you so much for your response to this issue. I believe mine is the same issue. I don’t sync up my iPhone to my Mac Mini. So what app did you use to select and delete those corrupted photo files? Appreciate the help!

i just used the Mac Mini photo software, turn on info for one image, it will show name of it, and use keyboard to go through all photos, delete long name ones. I think you don’t need to sync photos to PC.

Guys, don’t want to be overexcited but seems like the new iOS update solved the issue finally. Since I updated my phone and after 3-4 charges I have still no issue with my battery. Background activity is dropping every day.

I have exactly the same problem with my iPhone X. It all started around mid of last december, not sure exactly when. Before, I had never had any battery drain issue with my phone.

Since then I tried A LOT to get this fixed, no luck so far. Apple support only asked for factory reset including restore via ITunes. No success.

After full charge at night (wifi on) I can start my day as usual, phone body is cool (room temperature). As soon as I start using the iphone a little bit (eg checking for new emails, a little Whatsapp and reading a news magazine), the phone starts becoming higher temperature in the upper right corner at the back side. And then within the next 3-4 hours the battery drains down to 10-20%. (before that, it lasted usually1.5 days !!)

It is ALWAYS the Photos app, running in the background. Around 80-90%, all the rest of apps at a low single number % rate, and all time in background, almost zero foreground activity for Photos).

A few weeks ago I stopped all photo sync in icloud and on my devices (phone, pad, mac, windows pc), no luck. Later on I deleted all photos in iCloud and resettet my phone to factory default. NO RESTORE, instead I did set up a fresh new phone. And reconnected with my Apple ID and iCloud. Still same problem.

I will now try to verify the length of all photos file names and let you know.

>>And reconnected with my Apple ID and iCloud. Still same problem.

Little amentment: same problem when photos came back because I re-enabled photo sync on my Macbook and ipad. Then photos came from there first into icloud and then into my iphone.

It's not only they are not trying to fix this issue.. it's more about they are ignoring it! The staff in store, the cs on the phone, none of them know anything about it, and search online i find this is a problem since 2015! The only thing I can think is they are incompetent to fix it!!!

I tried dealing photos with the long file names and it initially worked for a few hours then as soon as I takes s picture, Photo begins heating up again. Why can’t Apple fix this issue? So frustrating!

Just sitting since a few minutes in front of my Macbook Air, and noticing the fan speeds up. This topic here in mind I find that photolibraryd is constantly at about 98% CPU load !! And using Fotos app and scrolling (with info window open) through foots, I find some with odd long file names...

Therefore I can confirm that I have high cpu utilitzation on Mac by photolibraryd as well as some photos with odd long file names.

During the next few days I will aim to find all instances and shorten/delete them. And then to see what happens.

I have an iPhone 6S, with OSX 13.3.1. I have had the same problem where, Photos eats up 50% and more of battery usage, even when I am not using the photos app during the time period I'm seeing reports for.

I noticed this started soon after I started using the "Albums" ... the Shared albums feature. The Photos app really became started performing poorly, it would crash when trying to work with the albums, whereas, it never crashed before, the phone started getting hot, the battery dropping like mad, etc.

Recently I got really fed up with it, anyways I downloaded everything I could from the shared albums, and disabled the shared albums. After 3 days it seems to have solved the problem. To disable:

Settings > Click on your face, the top Apple ID menu > iCloud > Photos > Turn everything off, especially "Shared Albums."

The photos themselves are backed up I believe as part of the backup of the phone. Periodically I move all the photos off the phone, and I have my own methods for simply backing things up using multiple external hard drives. I believe this is the best, most flexible, cheapest, safest way to do backups.

Thanks! Good luck,

Kevin

I have had this problem too with two successive 11pro iPhones. I have backed up and restored 3 times, once wiping the phone completely and reinstalling everything manually. Sometimes background photo levels are in the 80% even with normal day to day office use.

What is more the background refresh is chewing up data whether on cell or WiFi - sometimes 10GB a day and I am not streaming anything. Just emails and texts, the odd facetime call.

I have to carry a wall socket and battery pack everywhere. Not what o expect from a $1500 top of the line phone. Genius bar people have been beyond useless trying to rectify this. All started with the Ios13update which bricked my iPhone 8 plus.

Genius Apple!!

This has been happening since Nov. I am a

Update.

First: the long odd photo file names. After digging a bit into this topic on my Mac and PC, I would think, these long file names seems not to be the reason for the sync issues of the Photos app. I found may files with long hexadecimal names, also some with easy readablewords and even brackets - "(" and ")" - up to 51 characters long. However it seems to me that especially Whatsapp uses those hex names for photos since years. I found old files back from all the years, where I never have had any CPU load issues. Also the other photos with names given by some photo editing apps, are older than my current issue.

Therefore I think its not the filenames, that causes my problem.

Second: It seems, that I have made a promising step forward during the last two days. For the first time since two months, since yesterday my phone stayed cold and Photos cpu load under 50% and a few minutes ago at 10% and Whatsapp at the first place with 20% and another app at second with 13% !!!!!!!!!!! Wow!!!!!

So what did I have done? After I have backed up all my photos offline to my PC, and have had stopped all iCloud photo sync, I deleted all the photos in iCloud in on all my devices (iPhone, iPad, Mac, PC).

Then I wiped my iPhone and installed a fresh new setup ==without restore from iCloud== and waited a day before I logged into iCloud again. And after iCloud login, I enabled photo sync again and the photos came back to my phone. Shared Albums are still off. No Photo stream.

Then the CPU load was high again for longer than a day, I guess, thats normal full-sync activity. Since yesterday however it is falling down again, device temp goes is down, and battery drain is back to normal.

By now it is still too early for giving all-clear, however it is looking promising. After a few days I will let you know about the situation again.

Just a thought for now: as a last resort I would remove all the photos from ALL my devices and start at zero photos in my Apple world. It is really a poor sign from Apple, that they do not properly address these serious issues of their customers, thats not premium at all.

Negative :( Same problem back again. iPhone heats up and battery drains as fast as seen before. All the way down from 100% to 10% within less than 5 hours, and doing almost nothing with it. It starts usually when I did little bit with photos (taken a picture or using Photo app for checking my photo. Very very odd.

I will now delete all my photos off from my iDevices and iCloud, in the hope this will fix the issue and starting from scratch. Will backup all photos on my PC.

Another hope would be to wait for iOS 13.4, which is probably due for next month.

This is what also happens to me. Anytime I take a photo or edit a photo and save it, the iphone begins the heat up and draining process. @atrider - let us know how your "fix" works. Curious to see if any continued issues.