photoanalysisid CPU% at 0

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Level 1

130 points

photoanalysisid CPU% at 0

I recently downloaded my photos library to an external drive so that I could have a physical backup outside of iCloud. Close to 60k photos/videos. Photos had scanned everything when it was in iCloud so it's aggravating that it's scanning everything again after downloading them from iCloud to the new drive.

For a week now photoanalysisid is almost always at 0% CPU usage, and if I look at my library I get the revolving "Curating Best Photos, Composing Layout, Gathering Favourites, ANalysing Scenes, Detecting Deuplicates" msg. This has been at about 30% for 2-3 days. Leaving the computer on with the monitors turned off doesn't seem to help at all.

If I check the photoanalysisid process in Activity Monitor it doesn't list any files under 'open files and ports'. I also tried a smart album for files that can't upload to iCloud to see if there was an issue, but there doesn't seem to be any issue there.

Using an M1 Mac mini.

Mac mini 2018 or later

Posted on Sep 18, 2022 6:32 AM

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Answer 1

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Adam Shortt Author

Level 1

130 points

Sep 21, 2022 9:48 AM in response to Adam Shortt

Just wanted to offer an update. After a few days of nothing changing it seems to have jumped through most of the photos overnight last night. Only about 1k left out of the 50k+ that were in there.

Only thing I did differently last night was that I shut down any program I thought might 'work in the background'. Like MS Teams, iChat, etc. Not sure if that had anything to do with it but definitely saw a big change this morning.

I can now access the people album as well and only drawback in downloading my photos to an external drive is that a lot of them seem to have lost the manual Faces I had added to them over the past few months even though iCloud originally had them all in there without issue. Going to be a real headache going through all 50k photos to fix the people recognition and double check the meta data I had added to them.

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Answer 2

Old Toad

Level 10

210,467 points

Sep 18, 2022 9:48 AM in response to Adam Shortt

Photos is scanning the two libraries to make sure they are synced and contain the same photos. If you do a repair on a library, launch the library with the Command+Option keys held down) it will do a rescan to verify their sameness. It's the nature of the beast.

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Answer 3

Adam Shortt Author

Level 1

130 points

Sep 18, 2022 6:52 AM in response to Adam Shortt

Not sure if it helps but there are two processes in the Activity Monitor.

photolibraryd - this seems to run whether Photos is open or not. But most of the time it is at 0% CPU usage.

photoanalysisid - this is only listed in the Activity Monitor if photos app is open. but most of the time it is listed at 0% CPU usage.

if I sit and watch the Activity Monitor for a bit either one will go up to 0.01%, 0.1% or on rare occasion a little higher. but it only stays there for a split second before going back to 0%.

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Answer 4

Sep 18, 2022 7:38 AM in response to Adam Shortt

No, MacOS extended is fine - as long as you've not left it ExFAT.

Are you able to set the ignore ownership bit? (You don't need to actually do this, but having the ability confirms suitability of the format.

Then probebly it is just that this process seems either to run at very low priority, or doesn't actually need much CPU time. Either way it is a long process that can take weeks. Best is to forget it and just get on with using your mac. Eventually it will complete.

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Answer 5

Adam Shortt Author

Level 1

130 points

Sep 18, 2022 8:15 AM in response to TonyCollinet

Sounds good. I'll have to let it be and see what happens. Wish there was a way to increase it's productivity when it's not being used. Seems odd that it'd have to scan everything again as well if it was already previously scanned in the iCloud versions.

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