photoanalysisd taking large amounts of cpu

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.

It has thankfully stopped its latest cycle. It runs for hours, and then a few days later, it runs again, apparently for the same length of time. It seems to run every few days for hours even though I don't think my photo library has changed in that time. It is not just some process which has no effect. It uses so much CPU on my old MBP (along with some calendar daemon which also uses masses of CPU) that when I want to do something like stream a video, the CPU fan comes on so high it really interferes with the experience.

It is not true that running the photos app stops the daemon running. Just ran the photos app after a peaceful period, and now I have two processes taking more than 100% CPU - photoanalysisd and calendaragent. Are these two related? Seems they both restarted when I started photos app. I have 4,100 photos and I'm on MacOS 10.12.3.

This command use to work for me to disable the indexing -

"launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.photoanalysisd.plist"

However this stopped working when I upgraded to Sierra 10.12.4 with the error

"Operation not permitted while System Integrity Protection is engaged"

I receive this error with and without sudo

I then found this and it works for 10.12.4

If you want to disable it entirely, the first command stops it from respawning, and the second kills the one that is currently running:

launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd

launchctl kill -TERM gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd

found this solution here

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/5887s9/photoanalysisd_macos_sierras_most _contentious_new/

I hope this help someone else

al

P.S. to Appe ... give us a way to disable this in the settings of Photos!

Just never ends with Apple does it? Constantly doing what THEY think is right... great looking thinner but less useful laptops which have less power and less ports... great looking desktops that look like bins... now apps that take over the less powerful less useful laptops and desktops. But its OK because they've got a great looking HQ. I've used Apple products for 30 years plus, because they produced products that got more useful, not less.😟

Really makes me wonder about the intelligence of the developers and decision makers at apple. The feature is fine if you have 1000 photos. But if you have 70,000 it's quite a bit different. Close the photos app and the indexer runs, open the photos app and that consumes a ton of CPU. I've never heard a hard drive grind so much in any PC since maybe the Windows XP days. Sierra so far has been pretty disappointing on older systems. I don't own a Mac but I work on them quite a bit and it's pretty bad.

What's worse a virus that takes over your CPU or OSX taking over your cpu with some unstoppable process? At least you can kill the virus. As a very long time OSX user all I can say is *** apple some people like to use their CPU for things beside indexing photos. Why can't you stop this process? This is total BS from a user perspective absolutely no control of your system.

I had the same problem with my WIN crap. They (NOT ME!) decide what to do with my computer, like a reboot while I'm working or upload processes. Worst of all was SONY on WIN crap. You canna stop anything or purge the poor system from SONY.

Here, there WAS a law for standard technology called DIN and all our german cars had breaks and you could leave the car when ever you wanted ... I miss the old time 😉

I have tried everything suggested, I have Sierra 10.12.5 and guess what photoanalysisd keeps coming back even when I DO NOT have photos running anywhere on my iMAC. So it really is a bad penny that keeps coming back. I have even unloaded it via launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.photoanalysisd.plist not sure if this will work, just tried, it; however, if you do start photos after doing this command after disabling csrutil, it does relaunch, UGH. Wish apple would give us a REAL way to UNINSTALL it, don't need it, don't want it.

Same problem, but found a solution. Disable system protection, restart in single user mode (or login as root) and remove the com.apple.photoanalysisd.plist file. Reboot and it would be fine. Don't forget to enable system protection.

You can also set the file apart, so if you want to enable it just put it back.

I didn't see this happen. This customer is using a Foto's library residing on a Macmini server with 3 Mac's. When the first iMac opened the library (after being upgraded to Sierra) it starts to convert the library (Sierra is using Foto's v2.0, El Capitan is using v1.5 so all the mac's should be upgraded to Sierra to use it). After iMac1 had converted the library the problem appeared that when closing Foto's (only one Mac at a time can access it) the other Macs can't open it (message that the library was in use). I've discovered the photo analysis proces to be the cause on imac1, so I did the above to solve this. The proces didn't start anymore so I think it's save to say that the file won't be generated again. To my knowledge: if you remove a plist file from agents it's disabled completely (or some sort of protection has to prevent this, then it's another story...

Apple should give you the possibility to choose not to examine your Photo's for recognition of faces (that's what this process does to my knowledge) when opening or configuration Photo's for the first time.

Don't think it's intended to make you buy a new Mac (newer ones have the same problem) but I don't think Apple would mind if you do so 🙂

Apple should give you the possibility to choose not to examine your Photo's for recognition of faces (that's what this process does to my knowledge)

It does much, much more than that. Face recognition is a practically insignificant feature any more. iPhoto incorporated it years ago.