What is com.apple.MediaLibraryService?

I may be seeing a small improvement but not really to declare success. I've only tested with Pages so far, and com.apple.MediaLibrary.Service still goes to the top of the list for hogging memore and CPU. However, Pages now properly shows iPhoto and iTunes content in the media browser. Still doesn't seem to cache the photos; not sure if it that is designed behavior.

The upgrade to OSX 10.9.2 had added the stupid iLMBAperturePlugin2012 plugin again and com.apple.MediaLibraryService was at 99% again. => moved to the trash once more...

Does anyone know what the Aperture plugin does? Do we need it? If we don't need it, we can trash it. What is the use of this plugin? Before the 10.9.2 update I trashed all of the plugins and I have noticed any loss of functionality of my system.

I don't know, I can just guess: It provides 'Aperture' image contents for insertion into iLife applications such as Pages. Currently when I click the media button in a Pages document, there is just a spinning 'loading' symbol in the photo tab, while the music tab is filled with songs from the iTunes library. You can still drag'n'drop images into Pages documents, though.

Until Apple fixes the problem, I guess that is your tradeoff. But I'd recomment to analyze the com.apple.MediaLibraryService in the Activity Viewer first, before you trash anything. Maybe that problem with the iLMBAperturePlugin2012 is just with me and yours is different.

Your suggestion has proved successful for me .

Since I removed the iLMBAperturePlugin2012.ilmbplugin I haven't experienced the problem again.

I have subsequently checked the function in Aperture that links it with iPhoto, since this seemed to be one most likely to be affected by the plugin, but no problem is observed. [Does anyone know what this plugin actually does?]

Note that I have my Aperture library on a second partition of my startup drive -- no NAS involved.

Also, iTunes was NOT running when I first observed the problem ( quite accidentally -- I was not researching any particular performance problem) or at any time during problem-solving attempts.

Also, no iWork application was running.

This did the trick for me as well.

I have a huge Aperture Library. After moving iLMBAperturePlugin2012.ilmbplugin into a backup folder the insert media function once again displays Aperture content after a very reasonable few seconds. No excessive CPU utilization: com.MediaLibraryService had gone crazy before, now it calms disappears after a few seconds.

I left iLMBAperturePlugin.ilmbplugin in the folder /Library/Application Support/iLifeMediaBrowser/Plug-Ins and it seems that this is good enough for inserting media into Pages. It seems that also iLMBAperture31Plugin.ilmbplugin is not needed for inserting Aperture media.

Maybe older / conflicting plugin versions create the mess. In any case something that needs to be taken care of by Apple.

For the record: my problems are completely solved by formatting my hard disk and reinstalling Mavericks from Time machine backup. After that my MacBook is fast and has no performance problems anymore. I it is not necessary to remove any plugin.

What I recently observed running Yosemite is that if iTunes has not connected with my iPhone then the com.apple.MediaLibraryService will not start and thus there is no excessive CPU consumption when iTunes is playing music. Once I connect my iPhone either via USB or WiFi then com.apple.MediaLibraryService will start consuming a lot of CPU for several seconds every time a new song plays. Annoying to say the least.

Note, once iTunes has seen the iPhone I found I have to eject the iPhone then restart iTunes in order to prevent com.apple.MediaLibraryService from running.

Running 10.10.2 with a big iTunes library, and I'm getting lots of CPU activity on com.apple.MediaLibraryService. Disabling the plug-ins helped, but this is clearly a bug that needs fixing.

This worked for me, but remains a bug that should be fixed.

I found that I had this problem, also. I traced it to corrupt face.db and face_blob.db files in iPhoto that iTunes attempts to access in order for you to select photos to sync with your devices. The files are located at

/Users/{your user name}/Pictures/iPhoto Library/face.db

/Users/{your username}/Pictures/iPhoto Library/face_blob.db

I suspect it could be caused by any of the iPhoto databases if they get corrupted.

Losing your face.db is very unfortunate if you have spent a great deal of time identifying folks in your photo library. My faces in iPhoto had been broken for some time, and I failed to address it as soon as I noticed it. So, I did not attempt to recover the file from my time capsule, but it should be possible.

This is how I fixed my problem. First, I closed all programs, especially iPhoto and iTunes. Then, I opened a terminal window and [cd "/Users/{your user name}/Pictures/iPhoto Library" ] (need quotes around directory with spaces in their names.) Then I renamed (actually moved) the old files

"mv face.db old_face.db" and "mv face_blob.db old_face_blob.db"

Next, I started iPhoto. Once started, it begins to build the faces database by first finding all the faces in all your photos. This can take a very long time (several hours). I just changed my power setting to never sleep and never put the hard drive to sleep, and walked away. After I returned, iPhoto was done, so I closed it and started iTunes. Watched Activity Monitor and problem did not return. Connected my iPhone and selected about 600 pictures to transfer from iPhoto to my phone using iTunes. Sync'd. No problems. com.apple.MediaLibraryService stays at zero cpu usage most of the time. Never more than about 20% at peak.

I noticed that the new face databases were larger than the old (10% and 37%). So now I get to "re-find" all my friend and family. Something to do.

Further to my original post.

You might want to try the repair utilities for iPhoto before you attempt what I posted earlier.

iPhoto 6 and later: Rebuilding the iPhoto library - Apple Support

Close iTunes before you start the repair.

This seems to have worked for me. I had been toggling between Aperture and iPhoto a lot while creating a movie in iMovie. At some point, I noticed this service was hung up under Force Quit Applications. This seems to have stopped after using the Rebuild Database feature in iPhoto.

OS X Yosemite 10.10.2

iPhoto 9.6

Aperture 3.6