High Sierra photo editing slow

My Photos is at present working as it should!!! Here is the pain I went through to get this working:

1. I backed up my drive to an external drive using Superduper! - This makes a bootable copy of my system in case something went wrong( I also back up to Time Machine and Backblaze but I wanted to be safe)
2. I did a clean install of 10.13.3 High Sierra - which included the following steps
   1. Created a bootable installation USB drive for 10.13.3 High Sierra
   2. Booted system to the above USB drive
   3. Erased my hard drive using disk utilities on bootable USB
   4. Installed High Seirra
   5. During install, 1 migrated all users, data and settings EXCEPT applications from backup I made in step 1. This means I will have to install all 3rd party apps manually.
3. Once Step 2 completed in total(about 7 hours later) I tried using Photos and it worked great! Yay!
4. The next thing I did was install back my missing apps one by one. After each app install I would restart and check Photos. The apps that installed and DID NOT affect Photos performance are as follows:
   1. Office 2016
   2. Pages
   3. Numbers
   4. Keynote
   5. Backblaze
   6. Chrome
   7. Firefox
   8. Parallells
   9. iMovie
   10. Steam
5. Dropbox however broke Photos. I installed Dropbox for Business, linked it back to my Dropbox folder, rebooted, logged back in and waited for a bit. Then I checked Photos and I was back to the lock up behavior described in my previous post Once I quit Dropbox and uninstalled it (threw it away out of the Applications folder) and restarted, Photos started working as it should.

I will keep checking Photos over the next week and post if it starts acting up again.

Hope that helps - Will send Apple feedback as well.

Aloha everyone. I fixed my slow editing problem when I noticed i was editing "referenced photos" that's stored at another location. You can find out which photo is referenced by looking at the thumbnails. The referenced files has a little folder on top left of the thumbnail. Once you "consolidate" all the files (file/consolidate) it should speed up the photo editing slow down. I hope this helps!

I'll jump right to my personal solution.

I've got a 2014 iMac 5k with 1TB Fusion drive (128gb SSD + 1TB HDD) and photos was getting slower and slower as my picture collection grew (around 120gb worth) I moved my photos application to an External USB 3.0 SSD and photos is SUPER FAST now.

Your individual issue could be several things but first thing that comes to mind is your hard drive. If you have a HDD or a Fusion drive and your photos library has grown, it may be the issue (it seems to start slowing down when I'd get above 25gb or so) I tried reducing the data on my Fusion drive, getting it below 1/3 full, and Photos was still slow to load pics when i opened up and annoyingly slow at editing too. Same goes for using iPhoto or even larger folders with Preview. Moving my Media content to an external SSD has been the BEST upgrade I've ever made to any of my Macs. It literally feels like a different machine. I'll be adding a Thunderbolt connected SSD as well, but just an FYI, USB 3.0 was plenty good.

Yes as posted

Where is your Photos library located? Are you using iCloud Photo Library with optimized photos? How long has it been since you upgraded (there is a lot of background upgrading and scanning going on behind the scenes which can slow things down until it has completed)

LN

Good news! Thanks to my son, who cut his teeth on an Apple II+ when he was a young elementary school boy, my High Sierra iMac is functioning again and practically all the sluggish behavior is gone even when I'm editing Photos. He suggested that I restart in safe mode, a method totally new to me. My first attempt caused my computer to hangup while booting. He learned that this isn't uncommon with a wireless keyboard and that it might be avoided if one waits until the booting chime is heard before holding down the shift key (the act that causes safe mode) while the rest of booting takes place. I did this and found that almost all sluggish behavior has vanished. Curiously, however is the fact that when Photos was activated all of my still and video pictures taken after 1/25/2015 weren't present. Hopefully, reloading them from High Sierra backups won't cause the sluggish problem to reappear.

Oh, Sorry to hear that. I have iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch Late 2014. Before applying the update of 10.13.3 (maybe after applying 10.13.2), Photo Booth.app's suffered from serious frame dropping , Aperture.app got slow to load images, Photos.app also became really slow. Now, everything runs smoothly.

Dropbox however broke Photos

It is well documented that the iPhoto library can not be on any synced service, dropbox included. Having it on a synced external service like Dropbox will damage or destroy the library

Where is it safe to store a Photos Library? Requirements for the external drive

LN

Actually I did save every photo carefully after I read your post, and it does seem to help, so thank you, I do think it helps!

These are my other findings, for anyone trying to work this out (and it doesn't look like Apple is going to do anything):

Don't even think of using the new editing features (the lower part of the left hand bar) - just stick with the original features, they just about work, IF you don't use the cropping tool at the same time. If you want to crop, save and close first, then go in again and do the cropping.

Mixing up editing light/colour and cropping results in freeze and crash...

DO NOT use the retouching feature, it messes everything up and make the program crash!

I have bought Lightroom and now do the colour and light editing in photos, then move it over to Lightroom and do the cropping and retouching, then move it back in order to keep one library.

What used to take me about 4 minutes per photo series of 10 can now take up to 20 minutes... but at least I can function again thanks to Lightroom. And I'll have to consider how to run my business from here onwards.

It does all remind me of the days when I was a student in the 1990s and worked in a lawyers office typing out letters on MS Dos, having to second guess what I was doing and reading a book while my document was being processed. Not what I ever thought Apple would return to!!

High Sierra 10.13.4 has been released - install it and see if it resolves this issue

LN

Where is your Photos library located? Are you using iCloud Photo Library with optimized photos? How long has it been since you upgraded (there is a log of background upgrading and scanning going on behind the scenes which can slow things down until it has completed)

LN

After using Photos and watching network traffic in the last few days - this sure seems like an iCloud communication/sync issue with the photos library in iCloud. When trying to work on photos that synced that were shot on my phone, if I try to look through photos quickly or edit, Photos will lock up and even crash. If I wait for 30 minutes( letting the syncing settle down) and try again I have much better success. Something is wrong with the syncing mechanism and it locks up everything - I sure hope Apple is paying attention to crash reports and fixes this soon...

My Macbook Pro has exactly same issu. I found when ever if I unpluged the power adapter, and the system using the intergrated graphics, the photos app works just fine; but if I plugged the power adapter back in, the NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M discrete graphics will kick in, and everything in photos app became very slow.

Hi, there is no solution, there is no outlook for 10.13.x to fix, yet. Important work with photo? Sorry mate, you must go back to 10.12.6..., it should be ultra easy with CCC or even TimeMachine. Or switch to Lightroom.

This is a software issue with Photos, period.

I noticed the exact update when this started happening, since I work with Photos app on a daily basis:

it was when Apple announced more "advanced" edit features for the Photos some months ago and made it available in one of the High Sierra updates. Might have been at the same time they changed the file system as well, not sure about the latter.

My photo library is over 300 Gb, with many raw files and I never had such slowness, even when editing raw files back then.

After that update when Apple introduced more advanced edit commands, it IMMEDIATELY became sluggish and non responsive whenever I click the edit button.

This even happens if I create a totally new library with only 1 raw photo (doesn't have to be raw to notice the slowness, although it becomes more evident with RAW files due to the extra amount of information on it)

Editing a big library in the same laptop with raw files in other tools like Lightroom is no problem at all, good speed (MBPro 2015 with 16 Gb RAM).

So it is definitely a software problem in Photos app and there is no way Apple can be happy with it or not acknowledge it.

You should report the issue via an actual ticket visible to the Developers. If phone support cannot do that for you, you can go here: Product Feedback - Apple

Another avenue is https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/

It's worth noting that you should not need a paid account. You should be able to join the Developer program for free and report bugs.