Choppy / laggy video playback in Photos

I am running Photos on an early 2015 Macbook Air on Monterey 12.5, all up to date. Library's total size is about 300gb.

Video playback in Photos is choppy/laggy (although the sound is continuous), particularly for higher res videos, even if short. It's kind of sporadic; every so once in a while, one will play fine, but most of the time they don't. For instance, an MP4 export from my GoPro 10, even only 9 seconds long, gets unwatchably chopping within the first second of playback. This happens even when all other apps are closed and I've freshly restarted. All originals are downloaded (aka not optimized).

If I export the original to the desktop and play it in QT, works just fine, never an issue. Playback works flawlessly on my iPhone 13 Pro as well.

Have seen similar posts from years past, but none recently so hoping someone can shed some light on this.

Posted on Jul 21, 2022 3:34 PM

Top-ranking reply

Old Toad

Level 10

215,184 points

Posted on Jul 28, 2022 1:32 PM

As a test launch Photos with the Option key held down and create a new, test library. Import a couple of the videos and test to see if the same problem persists. Does it? This tells us if the problem is limited to your current library or is more wide spread.

If the problem persists log into a new, basic, admin user account, Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac, and repeat #1 above. This tells us if the problem is limited to your user account or is system wide.

View in context

Choppy / laggy video playback in Photos

Similar questions