Photolibraryd,photoanalysisd, and com.apple.photos.ImageConversionService constantly using high CPU

You may have items in your Photos Library that cannot be processed by Photos 5 on Catalina.

The the processes may get stuck when trying to process the incompatible items over and over again.

Sometimes we can find the items in the catches of the processes.

In the Activity Monitor double click the name of one of the processes, for example "ImageConversionService" or "photoanalysisd" and look at the "Open Files and Ports" tab. Scroll through the open items and look for image files or videos.

I found several items in my library this way. After removing the offending PDF. files and videos from the Photos Library, and restarting the Mac, the image conversion and the upload to iCloud could proceed and finish.

It should look like this in the Activity:

I found, for example, offending files of the cloudphotosd in ~/Pictures/Fotos-Mediathek.photoslibrary/resources/cpl/cloudsync.noindex/storage/filecache/

Update 2: The fix! A few days passed without any more problems. However, I needed to use an older photo library on an external HD. As I was dreading, a few minutes after connecting the HD and opening that library, my MacBook Air was ready to make waffles again (hot as heck!). Sure enough, activity monitor confirmed that the same two daemons were running amok. As I did previously, I found the photos listed in the Open Files and Ports for both offending daemons and opened them in the Photos app, reverted them to their originals, and then quit and reopened Photos. This worked!! No need to reboot in safe mode this time.

This wasn't as simple as it could (should be?) Copying the whole string and pasting it into spotlight didn't work and neither did the search in Photos. However, by leaving out the file name (id? - long list of numbers with the file extension - something like E504348832344.jpg) and only copying the string up to the folder that the photo was contained in, I was able to find and preview the photo in spotlight. Then I had to manually find that photo in the Photos App. Perhaps there is an easier way to do this?!

I am not sure why just a few photos (out of thousands) caused this glitch. They were all photos taken on an Iphone and then edited using the Photos app (on the Mac). Who knows...

Maybe you could re-create the old library? I recently re-created Mojave Photos library from scratch by importing 35 000 and several hundred movies to it (350 GB total). (Somehow there were numerous image duplicates in iTunes synced iPad (not in Photos), and I had also fixed the original movies' various date metadata elsewhere with exiftool and, so I decided to re-create the old library).

Normally I have the library on an external HDD but I created the new library to the internal Mac mini 2018 SSD knowing that it takes a while to scan faces etc especially on the slow HDD. It took "only" a week until it was ready and I then copied the library back to the external HDD.

During that week I tried to peek the Activity Monitor when the Photos daemons did their work. It seems that it didn't matter if Photos was open in the background or off (only when I was actively using it, those processes halted). And it seemed that the processes stopped their work at some point and only continued sometime the next day so I did not leave the Mac on during the night.

Has anyone tried to give those Photos processes more CPU time via the Terminal so they could do their job any faster?

I recommend to never kill a Photos-related process, even if you think there is something wrong. Rather, I recommend that you restart your Mac. In that way, the necessary process(es) will be restarted as necessary.

My only recommendation is to make sure that your Mac does not go to sleep (disable this in the "Energy Saver" system preference) and then simply wait it out. It is very common for Photos-related processes to run for many hours, especially after an upgrade of some sort or after I have updated one or more photos in some way.

There does not seem to be any way to know what Photos is doing or why it is busy. I would not attach any meaning to any of the vague messages that are sometimes displayed in Photos.

Have you opened that one file in Preview? Can Preview open it?

As you have the path to the image file you can open it by pasting the command below into the Terminal:

open ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/originals/0/0931DD57-B68C-477B-99E5-D57451F6A926.jpeg -a Preview

Don't modify the image, just look.

Sometimes the .jpeg files are actually TIFFs, camouflaged by a third party editor as JPEGs. Luminar is frequently storing huge files with the extension .jpeg in my library, that are TIFF files with many layers.

Can you identify the file by looking at the picture? It is difficult to find a photo by the filenames we are seeing inside the photo library package,

Thank you!

I have had the same problem, a few times since 10.15.5. I had added a few photos and initially had trouble editing them. The edit screen would come up, without any tools. Then I found that I couldn't add them to an album-Photos froze and had to be force-quit.

Eventually I found ImageConversionService running at 97+, and started Googling. Lots of totally useless suggestions (buy more RAM was one), and then I found yours... looked at Open Files and Ports, found the names of those images from yesterday. Located them in the library, went into Photos and deleted them, emptied the deleted photos, closed Photos, force-quit ImageConversionService, restarted Photos... so far so good.

Copied the images back into Photos, editing is OK, and I can add them to an album. But now, of course, photoanalysisd has started up at 70+ ! But I do know that photoanalysisd does end at some time!

More and more often I do think of leaving Apple, with their increasingly buggy software, but the alternative is too nasty to contemplate.

Thats good to know. I had a similar issue with a couple of photos, also taken on the iPhone, but which had been in the library for a couple of years without any problem. I removed them and everything is fine.

Lets hope the bug, whatever it is, gets fixed soon.

So what you describe is exactly what's happening to me but you lot seem to know all the proper technical language. I'm fed up. I think it's a push from Apple to get me to buy a new laptop - since mine was bought in 2015. They don't make any secret about pushing us towards constantly upgrading.

I think I need to upgrade because all this carry-open has been affecting my battery life too. Now when I'm not even using Photos the laptop starts to heat up and the battery goes from 100% to 40% within an hour or so.

SO now I have to fork out $2000 for a new laptop?? Not happy : (