High Sierra photo editing slow

I don't use iCloud to store my photos, because I knew I would go over the free limit right from the start, and I didn't want to pay for cloud storage (we do have a back up drive and Time Machine). Unfortunately, all my photos are on the iMac with High Sierra. The photos I use professionally I back up regularly onto a portable harddrive to store and then remove most of them from the computer once backed up. But, we also store our family and misc. photos on that same iMac, and those photos alone are still more than the free limit for storage. What I started to do a couple years ago is to back up photos onto DVDs annually, and remove all but my favorites from the computer. One of the Apple support people that I talked to last week suggested that I DON'T back them up to DVD's because of questionable shelf life problems, and he said I should always back up to a flash drive or back up hard drive, so I'm going to probably get another portable harddrive to back up all my photos. We back up our entire iMac with Time Machine anyway, so in a sense I'm backing up everything at least twice. With the current Photos problems, exporting photos has become very slow and I've noticed that about half of the photos I export end up being exporting at thumbnail size -- only about 700K. This is maddening. I photograph in raw and always export the photos at the maximum jpg size (about 8 to 12 MB or more). Everyone using High Sierra should check to make sure their photos are exporting at a proper jpg size and not at a very small thumbnail size.

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.

I have only been having a problem editing raw photos from my Olympus OMD M5. Raw files from my Sony RX100 and jpegs from the rest of my cameras and iDevices can be edited and do not slow my iMac to a crawl. I have taken to shooting raw plus jpeg with my Olympus. I am basically putting off editing the raw files from the Olympus until this problem is fixed by Apple. I know others are having problems with jpegs as well as raw, so this work around is not for everyone. My problem goes back to the release of High Sierra and I am stunned by the lack of a fix from Apple. This issue is spread out in several lengthy discussions and appears to be widespread. It seems that Apple is having some serious quality control issues with MacOS and IOS lately. My iMac is from 2011 and I was grateful when I found out that it would be supported for High Sierra, but I get the feeling that none of the hard work was done to make sure all supported computers and cameras would work with Photos.

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!

Good to hear, but in my case (and I guess a lot of other people), all my photos are in the same library, a local file on my macbook hd (an SSD drive), so there's nothing to consolidate (even if I try to use the option, that's what it says).

So for those in the same situation as myself, it won't help, but maybe it helps some other people.

I have no referenced photos and most of my photos do not present a problem. For me it seems like the largest raw files from one specific camera slow my iMac to a crawl. Others are having problems even with jpegs. I'm just curious if the size of the file has anything to do with the problem. For those having problems even with jpegs, it might be worth opening a problem jpeg in preview, resizing it to 4 megapixels or smaller, import it into photos and see if it can be edited.

I have a late 2012 27"iMAC. My iPhotos issue started when it could not backup files to my ext-HD and sent me into a circle of death until the High Sierra upgrade; but after the upgrade, iPhoto was useless, as it was no longer connecting to Facebook so I had to import all the photos it PHOTOS.... then after a recent trip and some 20 GBs of new photos and videos, the computer completely went dead. I changed the original 3TB fusion drive to a new HD (now it works like new) and discovered this "referenced" photo as a cause by accident. It could've been a corrupted HD or SDD as well ... and standard apps, like DISK UTILITY and EtreCheck found nothing wrong with my previous dying HD. If your HD or SDD is over 5 years old, that maybe another source of problem especially when processing big RAW pics that's over 20 mgbs each.

Bad news - I updated to 10.13.3 today and Photos is as slow as ever. Raw files take about a minute to be editable, even if they have been edited previously. The actual editing response seems slightly better but there is still a noticeable lag. Its unacceptable that the core image editing program that comes with the OS is slow, reported as such by many individuals, and yet the problem simply isn't being dealt with.

I can confirm that 10.13.3 may have slightly improved the slow editing. Of course it could just be due to restarting the computer. Still much too slow to be usable for editing raw files on my 2011 iMac.

Yes RCoindreau

they are more busy making iPhone and iPads then to make what ever they made work, no just dump more stuff out that is not working.

and when they had something that was good they just dumped like Aperture

what a big joke

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.

I've posted on this topic a couple of weeks ago and thought I'd found some relief after my son cleaned up my system, but no joy, it's still painfully slow. I don't recall, however, anyone describing the problem quite like mine. I have some 25,000 photos and videos hopefully backed up in three locations; Carbonite, iCloud, and Super Duper. It's important to me because my iMac only "sees" photos between 1/2001 and 5/2015, a condition coexistent with this High Sierra/Photos problem. My sluggish system won't make further updates to Carbonite and Super Duper, probably due to timing out? Fortunately, iCloud is keeping up. The Photos app on my iMac also doesn't see immediate pix, but my iPhone X and iPads do.

Note that so far no test has shown that you can restore a library backed up with Carbonite and use it - all tests show that Carbonite corrupts photos (and iPhotos) libraries

And iCloud is not a backup service at all, it is a syncing service

SuperDuper is not a place or a backup, it is an application that can be used to back things up by cloning them to a second location - using it correctly will give you a single bakcup of your current library but no history

THe best way to backup is using Time Machine plus a secondary backup like SuperDuper to a different external drive

LN

I also have the same issue - editing RAW images in Photos on High Sierra is almost unusable. I have another iMac still on Sierra and that works a dream - the changes you make are rendered instantly. On High Sierra The changes I make to the exposure or white balance for example take several minutes to appear, noise reductions does nothing, all of the filter previews are the same and cropping is severely laggy. This happens even if Photos is the only app open on a MacBook Pro 8GB RAM and SSD. If I try to use any other apps or the dock it hangs whilst I am waiting for the changes to render in Photos.

I have submitted lots of feedback reports and I have now opened a case with Apple Support. I agree it is not the Mac, it is High Sierra and the changes they have made.

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.