photolibraryd crashes my MacBookPro with Catalina

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Level 1

8 points

photolibraryd crashes my MacBookPro with Catalina

I am working with a 2018 MacBook Pro. For the past 6 weeks now I am experiencing fatal crashes - most times the entire system freezes. I uninstalled apps, removed content, formatted and reinstalled the entire system from scratch. Nothing helped

Finally I realized in system logs that either the kernel task or photolibraryd were always involved when it happened. My photo library is not particularly large (around 11.000 photos, 250 videos), roughly 46 GB in full quality.

I have now restarted the system dozens of times and kept an eye on the acivitiy monitor. The amount of CPU performance that is constantly taken by the photolibraryd service - even days or weeks after my iCloud content has been fully downloaded to the system, is insane. To my knowledge the only purpose of this task is to screen images and perform facial recognition - a feature I never asked for and would gladly disable but apparently that's not possible.

Since this is an expensive laptop I use primarily for work I finally had enough of this and removed my entire photos library in order to avoid these crashes. That is of course really not an acceptable permanent solution.

The only other clue I can provide is that I have found multiple entries by other users who have also used Microsoft OneDrive - like myself. So may be photolibraryd and the OneDrive system task are conflicting?

Looking forward to ideas how I could permanently disable this unwanted task on my system.

MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

Posted on Sep 10, 2020 9:55 AM

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Answer 1

SnickZ.

Community Specialist

Sep 11, 2020 11:55 AM in response to RD2812

Greetings RD2812,

We see that you've been trying to isolate what's causing the photo library to crash on your MacBook Pro, and we understand wanting to isolate this to prevent it from occurring in the future. You've come to the right place for assistance with this.

We'd recommend trying an NVRAM reset to see if this helps to clear up what you're experiencing. For assistance with that, take a look at the following resource:

Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac

If you see that this doesn't clear up what you're experiencing, could you let us know if this has occurred since removing the entire photo library?

We look forward to hearing back from you.

Cheers!

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Answer 2

RD2812 Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 13, 2020 1:37 AM in response to SnickZ.

Hello SnickZ.

I can tell you that I did not have a reoccurence of the issue for two days while I had my photo library completely removed from the system. When I decided to give it another try and reloaded my Fotos library off my iCloud account it took just a couple hourse before the crash reoccured (resulting in an automatic reboot of my system). Again, the crash log revealed that the photolibrary process was active at the time of the crash.

I have now followed your advise and reset the NVRAM of my Mac. I kept the photo library as is (which means that the process for face detection will kick in again whenever the Fotos app is not running). What amazes me is that this process runs for days - even though my machine is fairly powerful and has sufficient RAM (32GB).

Not sure what Apple is thinking here but it seems absolutely excessive that a modern machine has to do ANYTHING for days in the background while the user is not even asked or aware of the process until - as in my case - it crashes the system.

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Answer 3

RD2812 Author

Level 1

8 points

Sep 15, 2020 12:54 AM in response to SnickZ.

Hello SnickZ.

Update from my side. Following the rest of my NVRAM on this machine I ended up working for about 6 hours without a hitch and then yesterday I had several freezes and shutdowns in a row. This time it did not point to the photolibraryd daemon - according to my "Photos" status it apparently finished the process of face recognition.

Upon inspection of my laptop I noticed a relatively high temperature but nothing crazy. However, I ended up elevating my Macbook Pro and used an external fan for extra cooling.

Also, I have since installed Macs Fan Control und coconutBattery. I also came across a post somewhere that said I should connect the USB-C power cable on the right side (I had it connected on the left side of the system before) to avoid heating up that side of the laptop.

What still bothers me is that this laptop has been working fine for about 21 months. Then in July I had to have my keyboard unit swapped because the butterfly switches acted up and I was eligible for the free swap out of the entire unit (I think it comes with batteries etc). The problems started about two weeks after that repair. The Apple service location in my town ran HW checks and told me they could not detect anything faulty.

SOMETHING must have happened during this repair. Not sure whether there is a bad connection somewhere or the system is heating up due to something they did wrong when they closed up the unit again.

I am out of ideas at this point. Anything else I could check?

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photolibraryd crashes my MacBookPro with Catalina

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