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

OK - done that. It only took about a minute to boot up in safe mode - the first time, then 10 seconds the second time. Will report back as to how well it's behaving in a day or two : )

Thank you Bruce.

Thanks Leonie, that's very helpful. Unfortunately there are no obvious photos or files causing it to get stuck. Photoanalysis is currently running at over 100% CPU. I have not opened Photos for nearly 2 weeks as I kept getting system crashes and freezes. and have not taken any photos on my phone. I tried the usual safe boot, reinstall OS and Apple Support said it must be a hardware issue as the crash reports referred to GPU. However, in the last 2 weeks I have not had a single problem freeze or crash having not opened Photos, so I am convinced Photos is the problem. I notice on the statistics under 'Faults' it says 55603882 - does that number mean anything? It is running 12 threads and 253 ports. Any advice? Thanks

Just to add, I monitored the Open Files page and there are around 80 lines of activity. Two of the lines do show the filename for the photos, but they change once every 5 seconds or so. I have around 15,000 photos. Is there a reason why the photo analysis process may have restarted or does it loop continually?

Thanks

That sounds exactly what's happening to me Bruce. It gets stuck on one photo and have to force quit, etc.

Unfortunately I did the double safe-boot thing but it hasn't corrected it : ( However, mine didn't take long at all for it do do the boot cycle so I don't know if that has any significance?

This whole problem started for me after the upgrade to 10.15.5.

I’ve been having the identical issue since around April - I know the timing due to lockdown! I have tried the double safe trick and it worked for a while in terms of Photos staying up but other issues like blurry edits remained and Conversion services still swamped the cpu and memory eventually causing a crash. It’s really annoying as I have used Photos since going to a Mac in 2015 with mainly no issues. Any ideas would be useful. A search for the files in the detail of ICS finds nothing nor does trying to open them in Terminal.

So yes, this is frustrating to say the least. But at least I have finally found some other people who are experiencing the same problem I am. MacBook Air is constantly hot, photoanalysisid and com.apple.photos.ImageConversionService running at often 90+ CPU, edited pics appearing blurry - unless I click to edit again - and even then not having the editing menu pop up , and of course the pinwheel of doom if I try to drag certain pics to another album or to Line etc. This all started after upgrading my MacBook Air to Catalina. I have tried numerous fixes. I will now be trying the various fixes suggested here!

So I rebooted regularly after safe booting twice. For now, at least, neither of these processes are showing up on activity monitor. I would be elated if this solved the issue...

Thanks to everyone for taking time to post their ideas and experience here!

Can't help but would be interested in a response. I have been having these issues and more since updating to Catalina 10.15.5 recently.

Yeah. User satisfaction is not the thing supporting the price of apple stock.

@leonie, you said "You may have items in your Photos Library that cannot be processed by Photos 5 on Catalina."

Can you please elaborate?

I tried all the fixes suggested here, and the only thing that worked was buying a new MacBook Air :-(

> I have no 'old library' to re-import these from

If the problem does not resolve, you could export the images and movies (either the unmodified originals or, if you have made important edits to the images and metadata, the modified files*). Then create a new library from scratch and import the files back.

(*) I guess that introduces generation loss when jpg is recompressed so I wouldn't do that many times. I wish there was an option to write modified metadata to the exported originals.

if you want to create a new library, and your photos are already in iCloud, you can simply create a new, empty library and make this library your system photo library and enable iCloud Photos for this new library.

This way a fresh copy of your library will download from iCloud and you have essentially rebuild the library. The originals and edited versions will remain paired, the metadata preserved, the albums and folders will be preserved. However, I have usually lost some manually added faces, when creating the library this way, also the projects cannot be downloaded from iCloud. I would keep a backup copy of the library.

Bruce,

Thanks, that's helpful. I opened Photos for the first time in a while as I read somewhere that if Photos is open the Photoanalysis service pauses - which it did. I then noticed that something had triggered Photos to resync to iCloud and in the status bar on the 'Photos' view it stated that it was trying to upload 2 photos (which have been in the library for years), yet it seems to have got stuck on them. I exported the 2 photos, deleted them from the library, closed Photos and the Photoanalysis service has gone back to 0.1 CPU.

I can only guess that there is a bug that causes high CPU when it encounters an upload problem, but at least I have got to the bottom of it. I just need to solve the problem of Photos freezing now..............