photoanalysisd taking large amounts of cpu

Very similar experience for me as well. Mid-2011 MacBook Air. 25,000 photos and 2 weeks of screaming fan and slow motion desktop, and only 15,000 photos have been processed so far, and 10,000 to go. All of them have already been processed on my late 2013 MBA as well. No way to turn it off. Yes this particular machine is old, but no it's not okay to force this on us.

You can get a rough idea of timing by clicking on People, looking at the number of photos already processed, the number of photos remaining, and the amount of time the computer was on since Sierra was installed.

You can pause it by opening Photos (somewhat counterintuitive) or disconnecting from the power supply (which made me laugh since I'm on a desktop Mac). You may be able to stop the process in Activity Monitor. I haven't tried it.

Thank you for the link....I just sent my feedback as well. I have 35,000 photos, and my MacPro (mid 2012) has been nearly unusable for two weeks. Sometimes the entire system just grinds to a halt and a restart is needed. All of this has happened since Sierra installation. It's maddening and my workflow has been hampered seriously to the point of tossing the computer and considering another brand.

Don,

If you kill this process: photolibraryd, photoanalysisd will not start again.

Do a "ps aux" on terminal and you will find photolibraryd here: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/PhotoLibraryPrivate.framework/Versions/A/Supp ort/photolibraryd

firuz

I have this same problem. I updated to Sierra today and all of a sudden my MacBook Pro is running very slowly. I go to activity monitor to see that "photoanalysisd" is taking upwards of 140% of my cpu. Come on apple, I at least expect a pop-up telling me that it will run the photoanalysis in the background. Or maybe this can run when my MacBook is not in use?

Fix this please.

Thanks

What the actual ****?

My Mac has been dying for the past few days because of this! How do I just stop it altogether? I don't want this to run ever. I don't even want the Photos app on my laptop and would remove it if I could.

If you unplug the power supply, it will stop the proces temporarily (as it does while the photo app is open). So this what I do when I need a bit of performance from my mac, just unplug. Plug back in when I am not at my computer.

It's obviously laughable that this service cannot be paused in any normal way.

Anyone worked out how to turn this off ? There are typical apple bugs in this and mine is stuck at 233 photos left and keeps on spinning up photoanalysisd and consuming loads of CPU even when i'm using the computer !

It's a joke.

On a laptop, unplugging will stop the process. You can also quit the process in Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities), although that may be temporary, or kill it in Terminal.

As a side note, I was impressed with the accuracy of face recognition in Photos. Much better than previous versions. But that still does not mean it should be forced on users, especially with the risk of overheating/damaging their computer.

I agree. I do not like to have my MacBook pro running hot. It is obviously not good for it.

I opened Photos and noticed that photoanalysisd quit, then read later that that's the way

it works. So guess I'll have to open Photos every time I turn my computer on. I don't

need my library "to be queried in clever ways." I just want my photos in the folders

I put them in with the names I give them. There needs to be a way to turn off

photoanalysisd for those of us who do not care about this feature.

The responses about the photoanalysisd process taking a long time (overall), depending on the number of photos, are unhelpful as they do not address the original question about high CPU utilization of the process. That process should have been designed to run at lower priority to avoid impacting user interaction.

Replies about opening Photos.app to pause/stop the analysis do not agree with my observations: with Photos open, the analysis process is still crunching CPU cycles, for me.

I find myself having to renice the process, with moderate positive effect.

Photos 2.0 (3130.0.240)

macOS 10.12.2

Those "unhelpful" responses explain what the process does, which was part of the original question.

Photos will pause the process while it's running in the foreground. So the usability of that method is very limited.

Unfortunately no one here can redesign the process so your best bet is sending feedback for Apple and hope they fix the problem in an upcoming update.

I think you might be over-reacting a little bit.

If it's indeed a low priority process, it should not be stealing any CPU cycles from other applications. Most applications are basically idle most of the time anyway. If Ghanabi's 4k video software is literally CPU-pegged, it might be losing some CPU to the photoanalysisd but not a lot.

However, I just checked, and on my Mac the process has normal priority. Oh well.

I think Apple, in general, has done an OK job with this particular issue. Performing object recognition in photos is super hard even though humans do it effortlessly, and they have produced a solution that handles this difficult process over the course of hours or days. Yes, your CPU might get warm or hot while it's doing it, but it shouldn't hurt it.

They could have, I suppose, just done one photo at a time and had a little sleep between each photo, and try to spread out the CPU load over a long period of time, but then it might just take forever.

Meanwhile, I came to this thread because I am frustrated that this process takes up a lot of time every time I wake up my not-often used family computer (where lots of the photos are stored). For some reason it seems to need to spend a lot of time looking at photos I am pretty sure have already been analyzed, while I am equally sure that I have not added any photos to the library lately. That might be a bug and I would like that one fixed. It doesn't seem to happen on my daily use laptop, for comparison.

No one is arguing about the quality of the analysis. I'm actually very impressed at the accuracy of face recognition.

The argument is that the user has no control over the setting. In some cases (e.g., lots of photos on a laptop), the process is overwhelming, possibly putting wear and tear on the equipment.

A simple solution would be to add a "photo analysis" tab to Photos, containing a slider labeled Off | Low | Medium | High priority. This would allow people who do not want the feature to turn it off, and people who have a machine that supports it could make it faster.

I have bought this crap of Mac Book Problem and they forgot to build in a stop button for the face analysis. I tried everything, kill etc. but it is like a virus ... a so called laugher is starting is again and again and again.

Thinking about going back to Ubuntu.