photoanalysisd taking large amounts of cpu

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.

This command in Terminal should quite photoanalysisd task and prevent it from appearing in future:

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

To re-enable photoanalysisd:

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

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 followed this response from another person in this discussion and it seems to have worked. My MacBook Pro

no longer heats and it do not find photoanalysisd listed on my computer. Judy Lundberg

I have about 50,000 photos and videos in a library that is "under repair" after I moved it between two external hard drives. This process is one of three or four that I see executing something related to photos, but I am unable to see any progress. When I open the Photos application, it shows me 90% for hours at a time and I never actually see the "people" option to see how many actual photos have been processed.

I also opened a call with Apple support and they never suggested looking for this process. I'd think their procedures would benefit from some guidance on this common situation (even if you give callers an estimate of 1,000 pictures every hour, that's useful guidance).

I tried using renice on the processes, but it doesn't seem to change their level of CPU consumption. Unlike others in this thread, my CPU is largely idle as this process is running, but memory consumption is very high. I actually upgraded to Sierra today and did the library copy right after, so I'm sure that they both have an impact on this.

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.

Are you sure it died because of this?

Changed my mind. Clearly this issue is impacting lots of people worse than it impacted me.

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.

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

Pasting this into Terminal worked for me. Instant halt of the process. my 27" imac is back to low-res gaming! 😁

The Photos app has to be launched AND be in the foreground for the process to pause. So, essentially, it only stops when you're actively using Photos, not when you're trying to work in another app.

Won't the com.apple.photoanalysisd.plist be regenerated once you start photos? if this is the case then if I use Photos then I will have to repeat, right?

Thank you for your explanation, appreciated it will give it a try?