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Photos Is frequently not responding/crashing, I have to force quit to continue, how i can reload the software?

Photos Is frequently not responding/crashing, I have to force quit to continue, how i can reload the software?

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.15

Posted on May 23, 2020 3:04 PM

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Posted on May 24, 2020 6:53 AM

Before you go to the trouble of reinstalling, I would try to find out if there is a reason for Photos crashing or being slow.

  • Did you update to the most recent version of Catalina -macOS 10.15.4 to get all bug fixes?
  • Do you have plenty of free storage on your System volume? At least 10GB of storage, better more?
  • Do you have items in your Photos Library that Photos 5 cannot handle? The upgrade to Catalina made older video formats and image formats redundant. You may want to check the olde rvideos and scanned i ages, if Photos can still edit them. Remove all PDF files from your Photos Library.
  • If Photos can work with a new test library without crashing or hanging, your current Photos Library may have a corruption or contain incompatible items, or is stored on an incompatible external volume.


If even a new, empty Photos Library for testing does not help., reinstall macOS. To reinstall the system I would start the mac from recovery and follow the instructions here: How to reinstall macOS from macOS Recovery – Apple Support


3 replies
Question marked as Best reply

May 24, 2020 6:53 AM in response to jev1104

Before you go to the trouble of reinstalling, I would try to find out if there is a reason for Photos crashing or being slow.

  • Did you update to the most recent version of Catalina -macOS 10.15.4 to get all bug fixes?
  • Do you have plenty of free storage on your System volume? At least 10GB of storage, better more?
  • Do you have items in your Photos Library that Photos 5 cannot handle? The upgrade to Catalina made older video formats and image formats redundant. You may want to check the olde rvideos and scanned i ages, if Photos can still edit them. Remove all PDF files from your Photos Library.
  • If Photos can work with a new test library without crashing or hanging, your current Photos Library may have a corruption or contain incompatible items, or is stored on an incompatible external volume.


If even a new, empty Photos Library for testing does not help., reinstall macOS. To reinstall the system I would start the mac from recovery and follow the instructions here: How to reinstall macOS from macOS Recovery – Apple Support


May 24, 2020 9:58 AM in response to jev1104

Also it's probably the library that's damaged, not the Photos application so reinstalling the system and Photos app will not accomplish anything. Let's try to find out what's causing the problem in the first place.


Download and run Etrecheck. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support  to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.


Copy the report



and use the Add Text button to include the report in your reply. How to use the Add Text Feature When Posting Large Amounts of Text, i.e. an Etrecheck Report


IMPORTANT:


Before running Etrecheck assign Full Disk Access to Etrecheck in the app's Privacy preference pane so that it can get additional information from the Console and log files for the report:



ALSO IMPORTANT:



Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine the root of the problem.

Photos Is frequently not responding/crashing, I have to force quit to continue, how i can reload the software?

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