High Sierra photo editing slow

Yes, I have High Sierra on my 2011 iMac, and retouching in Photos is suddenly pretty impossible, even with all other programs closed. Each retouching action takes about a full minute to complete, and even then, I often have to repeat the same action several times for it to work.

Gee I hope it’s not hardware!

For me everything is running very fast and smoothly in High Sierra on my late 2014 27” iMac. I.e. iMovie is brilliant and all other apple apps are great and civ6 is excellent... BUT Photos is the big problem

With slow retouching and crashes... I outlined my workaround in another post using Sierra on one iMac/iCloud/High Sierra on another iMac.

I must say I hate, HATE, Photos since I've done the update to High Sierra 10.13.2 and Photos 3.0. Editing a photo is ridiculously slow. Like impossible to get results. I take photos in RAW so they're large files. In the previous edition of Photos I was able to edit seamlessly. Not so with the upgrade. Very frustrating. I've read through the replies on this thread and have found no useful fix. If things (such as face recognition) are happening in the background and slowing down the editing process, that is unacceptable. This is the first time I've ever been truly disappointed and frustrated with an Apple upgrade.

I actually had the opposite reaction from Apple support this weekend. I called on Saturday and explained my problem and frustrations. I was on hold for 30 minutes (which was annoying) but an actual human being kept interrupting the hold music to tell me they were still with me. However, after 30 minutes I hung up, intending to call back at a less busy time than a Saturday morning. However, someone from Apple called me back within 5-10 minutes, listened to my complaint, and connected me to a support advisor. The advisor listened to my complaints and asked me if he could connect to my computer and view what was happening in Photos. He spent 30 minutes on the phone with me as I demonstrated the problems I’m having with Photos (he was taking notes the entire time). He had me replicate the problems with RAW files and jpgs. He had me create a new Photos library to see if the problems occurred in it (they did). He had me login as a new user and replicate the problems in a Photos application under that new user (once again problems were the same). Eventually he had me

run diagnostics (activity monitor) as I was editing photos. This I uploaded to him at Apple’s website. He acknowledged Apple is aware of the problems and the engineers are working to correct. The diagnostics he collected were sent to the engineers to help determine a solution. Although he couldn’t provide me with a solution at this time he did provide me with his contact information and said he will contact me if further info becomes available. He offered to help me reinstall the system, although he said others have done so to no avail. I didn’t see a need to reinstall the system. So . . . my Photos problem is not solved at this time, but I am hopeful because it seems to me Apple is

well aware of the problem and eager to fix it.

What is weird is that I actually have to consider building a Sierra Virtual Machine to run under High Sierra, just have use Photos under Sierra...might actually get around to doing it, considering I have 16 Gb of RAM, so it should behave ok.

I am fortunate to have two Macs, and only upgraded to High Sierra (on a whim) on my large screen iMac. After seeing the Photos problem happen right away, we chose not to upgrade the laptop, so at least I have that to edit current photos on. But I want to see them on the iMac, so I have to transfer them to that to view in Preview at full size. Maybe if you can get access to a MacBook Pro in Sierra until they fix the Photos app, you can at least keep everything intact.

When I switched from Aperture to Photos, I missed all the features that were lost, but Photos was much faster with my 10,000 plus photo library. The plug-in implementation is not great, but it did add back some functionality. It is only since the latest version of Photos and High Sierra that things got super slow. By the way, iTunes sync is pretty much broken for me as well, so I now use iCloud Photo Sharing albums to make the latest photos available to all the iDevices in my household. Much less work than syncing them all but much more limited. Again, until the slow editing is fixed, I am shooting raw plus jpeg and putting off editing the raw files for now. Really frustrating how long this is dragging on.

Indeed, my version of iPhotos is 9.6.1 and it does work well. Photos isn't affected. Following advice from another site, I went into the App Store and clicked on Purchases at the top. IPhotos was there since I'd had it previously. I just downloaded it again. The downside is that it has all my photos are there UP UNTIL I switched to Photos (as advised by Apple Care). But, as I said previously, I intend to edit the new photos in iPhoto then move them to Photos hoping that Apple gets their collective heads out into the daylight soon.

I'm seeing that a lot of users with problems are using older Macs.

I also have a 2011 MBP with 16GB of RAM and SSD.

I think Apple broke something with older Macs.

It's not that our machines are incapable of handling RAW editing, since Lightroom works flawlessly, but something on Apple's side.

My hope is that if we keep up the chatter, someone at Apple will notice. They certainly get the crash reports. It's difficult to not take personally since the typical Apple consumer is pretty loyal, but since the departure of Aperture, Apple has not been too caring of those of us who have a serious photography "habit."

One thing that I have discovered that seems to result in far less crashing is to individually save each photo after editing ("Done") and do nothing else until the "pie" in the header indicates it's saved. This is slow, but if it avoids crashes and re-starts, at least it's something. Given the age of digital photography, I am puzzled as to why Apple does not give Adobe a run for its money by providing a serious Lightroom competitor that does not include cobbling together apps as extensions with Photos.

I also shoot exclusively in RAW. As I said previously, I re-loaded iPhotos and process there. Then I move the images to Photos. I found not all the images transfer, however. Another benefit to using Apple.

I found using Photos so frustrating I decided to buy Lightroom.

It's great of course and apart from taking ages to open in High Sierra once in use it's workable quick.

I'll not be going back to Photos. Very poor show from Apple.

I'm running High Sierra on MacPro3,1 (2008) and Photos is really, really slow, especially with raw images. I was using Aperture up until last fall and actually it had similar symptoms under High Sierra (I know neither my Mac nor Aperture are officially supported, but there are ways around it). I've tried running the Photos library from both the PCIe-attached SSD boot drive as well as a non-boot Fusion drive, no difference. Update to 10.13.4 made no difference either. All Photos related background processes have finished long ago. I really hope Apple will fix this sooner than later!!

I've began to wonder if the GPU would play some role here - mine is Nvidia GT120. CPU-wise I've had very few performance issues with intensive raw editing (2 x quad-core 2.8), and FCPX runs nicely even with H.264 timeline content.

Hi,

I've followed the instructions in this topic and installed nvidia drivers (Web drivers & CUDA) on my Macbook Pro (10.13.5) and I have noticed a lot of improvement.

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1025945/cuda-setup-and-installation/mac -cuda-driver-fully-compatible-with-macos-high-sierra-10-13-error-quot-update-req uired-quot-solved-/1

List of web drivers:

https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/324195-nvidia-web-driver-updates-for-mac os-high-sierra-update-06012018/

Br,

Ruben

I've followed the instructions in this topic and installed nvidia drivers (Web drivers & CUDA) on my Macbook Pro (10.13.5) and I have noticed a lot of improvement.

I am having the slow editing problem with my 2011 iMac with AMD Radeon HD 6770M and my wife has similar problems 2013 MacBook Air with Intel HD Graphics 5000. The Apple Photos specialist I spoke with was experiencing freezes and slow editing in Photos on her own Mac, which was most likely a new computer. She was focused on the specific camera versions that were generating the problem raw files. I have many different raw files from older cameras that cause no problem at all, and of course no files from any iPhone or iPad cause the issue.