photoanalysisd taking large amounts of cpu

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.

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 😉