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I have a 120 GB Photos library on an external USB 3.0 drive (formatted as MacOS extended (journaled)), connected to my M1 Mini and the latest Big Sur. Photos is so slow that it's almost unusable. I've run speed tests on the drive and it seems fine, and there's plenty of free space on the drive.
Is there any known way to speed things up, or is Photos kind of abandonware by Apple?
Mac mini, macOS 11.4
The iPhoto Events are just a folder with albums, one album for each event you had in created in iPhoto. If you do not use these albums any longer, you can delete the albums.
-25 GB free on internal system drive
25GB of free storage (or is not free but "available"?) is very low, while Photos is analysing a library. I would try to free more storage. Photos on my smallest MacBook Pro with just 250.69 GB capacity on the system volume is as slow as molasses when the available storage drops below 30GB.
-To my knowledge, all files are standard JPEG, PNG, TIFF or movie files.
Have you checked this? You may want to search with a smart album for items that are not JPEG, PNG, TIFF and to look at the codecs of your videos. How to Weed out Legacy Media in Photos for Mac - Apple Community
One bad apple could be holding up the show.
The iPhoto Events are just a folder with albums, one album for each event you had in created in iPhoto. If you do not use these albums any longer, you can delete the albums.
-25 GB free on internal system drive
25GB of free storage (or is not free but "available"?) is very low, while Photos is analysing a library. I would try to free more storage. Photos on my smallest MacBook Pro with just 250.69 GB capacity on the system volume is as slow as molasses when the available storage drops below 30GB.
-To my knowledge, all files are standard JPEG, PNG, TIFF or movie files.
Have you checked this? You may want to search with a smart album for items that are not JPEG, PNG, TIFF and to look at the codecs of your videos. How to Weed out Legacy Media in Photos for Mac - Apple Community
One bad apple could be holding up the show.
120 GB of photos is not that much. My library has a size of 230 GB and it is reasonably responsive.
Did you just upgrade to Big Sur, so Photos may still be using a lot of time on scanning the library for objects or faces?
How much free storage is on your system volume? Photos will need some working space on the system drive as well.
Are you using iCloud Photos? Are any images or videos in your library, that are in a format, that is no longer supported by macOS 11? For example older videos or old scans in a formt that is neither JPEG nor TIFF nor HEIC nor a RAW file? Videos that are neither HEVC nor H.261?
Thanks for the response:
-No, the computer came with Big Sur (and can't run anything below)
-25 GB free on internal system drive
-No, not using iCloud Photos
-To my knowledge, all files are standard JPEG, PNG, TIFF or movie files.
Photos takes a couple of minutes just to open. If I leave
I do have a lot of "iPhoto Events" because that's the way iPhoto imports used to be organized. Don't know if that's somehow slowing things down or what.
Should I leave Photos open to index or something? Any way to see if indexing is the issue?
If you wait a week or so, I can tell you how iPhoto works on my similarly sized library on my new 24" iMac. Though I intend to move it back to the main HD.
Actually, you want to leave it running in the background, just leave it on and go about your business.
Mine is perfectly fine. I see no difference from my other computer.
Photos app is unbearably slow (M1, Big Sur)
