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Photos app high cpu usage

God, after import from iPhoto library, this Photos app constantly has 200-300% CPU usage.


Any one has this issue?

Posted on Apr 8, 2015 8:28 PM

Reply
14 replies

Feb 28, 2017 10:36 PM in response to KiltedGreen

Three hours would be nice. I'm going on 4 days and 20 hours to process my 50K+ number of photos. I'm trying to reorganize my photos outside of Photos to totally by-pass the Photos app. In the process, I have to import several Photos library and re-export the individual photos to an external hard drive. The whole process comes to a near-halt because of this uncontrollable recognition feature.


Come on Apple! Give us back control over our own computers! Provide an off-button for this feature!

Apr 9, 2015 1:48 AM in response to homever

I experience a similar issue.

Every time I open Photos.app, this app causes a 100% CPU load.

After about 10 minutes it "drops" to 80% CPU load. 😕

My MacBookPro sounds like a starting JumboJet 😉

After about 25 minutes the CPU load turns back to normal.

Is that behavior normal for Photos.app?

The "old" iPhoto.app never needed that high amount of CPU time.


Has anybody suggestions, how to fix that?


The "photolibraryd" process needs from time to time some CPU time. Wich seems normal to me.

Apr 9, 2015 7:15 AM in response to homever

I had a similar issue with high Photos cpu usage. I have an iPhoto library with ~ 40 GB photos stored outside of iPhoto on a SDXC card. After migrating the iPhoto library to Photos, the Photos program uses ~100% cpu whenever I start the program. I thought the program might be doing with the faces and preview thus left the program open and running. Three hours late it continued the high cpu usage. I gave up and back to iPhoto. FYI, there is even no option in Photos to turn on/off collecting faces.

Apr 13, 2015 2:23 AM in response to homever

same here on. it has been running overnight, , total cpu time so far is 18 hours of about 200% cpu usage since importing.

i quit once at about 8 hours, and then i left on again overnight for another 10 hours.

still.. it seems too much of processing time..

i checked the "opened files" from activity monitor and compared, i could see that the app is reading and processing different photos, thumbnails, and face data each time.


i'll leave it on overnight again and see how it goes, then i'll decide if i should keep this or go back to iPhoto


data:

iphoto library is about 220gb with 20k photos+videos. on a usb drive

macbook air 1.8ghz

Apr 14, 2015 3:24 AM in response to xtedx

ok, just an update:

turned out that it finished processing after a total of 25 hours cpu time.. phew. that's about 12 photos/videos per minute

i was just wondering why there was no indicator of the progress, or why did it have to reprocess the whole library although it converted the iphoto data.

Nov 4, 2015 1:08 AM in response to homever

I'm seeing this 100% CPU usage too, but in my case, I am not able to import even a single photo in Photos.

It just beachballs forever.


This is ridiculous. How does something like this get released?


And just while I was trying to deal with this and search for answers on the internet, my keyboards stopped responding. Alt-Tab worked, but nothing else. Neither the laptop's built in keyboard would work nor the USB keyboard. Tried all sorts of things to fix it, but ended up rebooting to fix it.


What the **** is going on at Apple these days?

Oct 9, 2016 7:04 PM in response to anmsat

I've seen this on almost every update. It does take quite a bit of CPU % on the user account but in most cases its because of the quality of the photos / videos. I love the Photo's App because of all the features but I can agree that it can cause high activity. The best thing to do is to give it time, if you have a Photo library like I do (28,000 photos) it can take awhile for the Faces feature and now on Sierra the People's feature. I love this feature in Photos but it took a couple days for it to complete and really lower the CPU usage because of the size of my library. I know this post was from last year but I figured since a new update was out, that I'd follow up with something similar because of the new Photo's features. If your Mac is running hard and starts up sounding like a Jumbo Jet lol, rest the SMC. On laptops, Turn off Mac > unplug power source for 15 sec > plug back in and press down (while the Mac is still off) Shift, Control, Option and Power button at the same time for less than a second > nothing should happen > then power on.


On Sierra the program I saw running the hardest was Photoanalysisd, and the User CPU consistent around 80%. If this is is what you'r seeing then the best thing to do is stay patience and minimize Mac usage until Photo's is complete.

You can tell this on Sierra by opening Photo's and selecting "People" and this will show you how many it still has to complete. When the Photo's App is open, the Photoanalysisd will pause until Photo's is closed.


With new updates come's new features that each Mac handles differently because the Programs & Components / Memory, Storage, & Age are.....different.


Hope this helps!

Oct 25, 2016 9:18 AM in response to homever

I also have a similar problem. I have a moderate sized library ~7,000 photos, and sometimes it just goes away for 5 minutes or more with the spinning beach ball. Activity Monitor shows CPU usage of 95–100% for a task called photolibraryd, and Photos is shown as "Not Responding". Memory Pressure is low, there is very little other activity, maybe 10 - 15%.


I do have a lot of Smart Albums, and I have folders that are nested 3 – 5 deep, with mostly Smart Albums in them. That may require a lot of index manipulation. I don't know enough about Photos to have any idea. I have also had Photos crash at least twice while in this state.

Photos app high cpu usage

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