Photos freezes with Mac OS 10.15.5

Hello jcgalizia,

I see that you're have an issue when using the Photos app after updating the software on your MacBook Pro. I understand wanting to get this issue resolved, and I'd be happy to look into this with you.

Let's start by having you start your Mac in safe mode and then test to see if the issue remains.

How to use safe mode on your Mac

If the issue remains in safe mode, create a test user on your Mac and test one more time. The article below will guide you through those steps, if needed.

How to test an issue in another user account on your Mac

Let me know how this goes.

Have a great day!

I may have fixed the freezing that I reported when clicking on a smart album in macOS Catalina 10.15.5, although it is difficult to conclude this 100% without further testing. I tried two things to fix my problem (it is never good to try more than one thing at a time because then it is difficult to know which thing fixed your problem, but I was desperate):

1. I repaired my Photos library (by starting Photos while pressing Cmd-Opt). The implementation of this repair mechanism may have been changed by Apple, but I will document that in a different posting. The repair seems to be performed more quickly that it used to take.
2. I assigned a test keyword to all of the items in my library. After update activity related to this change seemed to subside (by monitoring activity in the Activity Monitor application) I then removed the keyword. The reason that I tried this is that I was concerned that my problem might be due to issues related to metadata managed by Photos and macOS in general. I suspect that assigning a keyword to an item forces metadata to be updated for the item, so I did this for all items in my library

Anyway, my fingers are crossed that the beachballing problem has been fixed for me.

I just upgraded to macOS 10.15.5 and I too am having serious problems with freezing, although not the same as you. Photos beachballs when I a click on a smart album to view its contents. This doesn't happen for all smart albums, but enough of them that I cannot get any serious work done. I am now trying a library repair to see if that helps. This will take at least a week since my library is over 600 GB. Ugh...

The implementation of this repair mechanism may have been changed by Apple, but I will document that in a different posting. The repair seems to be performed more quickly that it used to take.

Yes, please, let us know what you are seeing.