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

Pretty much since I updated to catalina 4 months ago these three processes have been CONSTANTLY using upwards of 90% CPU all the time.

It is rendering Photos almost useless; I'll click on a photo and then on Edit and nothing will show up. If I try dragging a photo off to the desktop I get an endless pinwheel. When I click on photos (and this is the most worrying part!) they're blurry and pixelated, which I KNOW the originals aren't.

I suspect the two things are related. My photos library has over 35K photos in it, going back over 20 years. (before iPhoto, even, but all my existing ones were inported into iPhoto when I started using that...) This was not an issue prior to updating to Catalina.

Is there a way to fix this issue?

Mac mini, macOS 10.12

Posted on Jun 29, 2020 3:53 PM

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

204,097 points

Posted on Jun 30, 2020 4:48 AM

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/

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

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