High Sierra photo editing slow

Yes, ditto for me. The update to 10.13.3 (twice) didn't solve the problem on my iMac. And I've repaired the Photos library countless times, which yields no solution. It's still as bad as it was two months ago.

I had a long chat with a Photos app specialist at Apple support. She is having the same problem with Photos herself and 10.13.3 didn't fix it for her either. She says she gets the spinning beachball and a completely unresponsive system trying to edit raw files. She noted that seconds on her menu bar clock stop counting while this is happening. She took information about the specific cameras and file types that are problematic for me and is reporting it to the programmers and keeping the case open. Clearly Apple is aware of this issue and I am just shocked at how long it is taking them to address it. More than three months! I only hope that more reports will motivate them to fix this. She was also aware of many reported problems with syncing photos via iTunes. It has stopped working for me and I only use iTunes sync for videos and music now.

Thanks for this.

I'm still having trouble using jpeg's (2mb or more usually).

So I'm still using my work-around with retouching being done on another iMac with Sierra.

Trouble is Apple isn't getting barraged with crash reports the more we use work-arounds.

I'm happy to send a mod one of my jpeg's that is one of many that always immediately crashes Photos 3 - even just viewing sometimes let alone trying to get into edit mode.

I think it quite wrong that Apple doesn't engage its own support forums to placate us with Apple's plan. At the moment we are all just floundering around...

I have the same issues as the rest of you. 10.13.3 did nothing to help. I reloaded iPhoto and will use that for editing as long as I can or until Apple fixes their mistake. Then I'll simply move the edited images to Photos to keep them all in one place. I wonder if this is a ruse on Apple's part to force us to pay for iCloud storage.

I agree 100%.

Were you able to download and install iPhotos even with High Sierra? If so, and it works, what version of iPhotos? Does it conflict at all with Photos? I might try that myself. I'm getting really frustrated having to move raw photos back and forth between my iMac (on High Sierra) and my MacBook (still on Sierra).

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 am very frustrated with the continued problems in Photos. I now have an added dimension to the problems. My photos from my Sony A7 are showing up as solid red blocks, no image! And a photo I took yesterday with my iPhone 7Plus in Live format is also showing up as a red block until I click on it and play the image, then I can see it, but only as I click on the image. I sync up to iCloud and backup to time machine. The other annoying firstworld thing is that when I go to to the apple store and play with one of the shiny new macbook pros (I have an early 2011 15" with 16gb ram and 1tb SSD drive) Photos works flawlessly... I will report to the developer portal

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.

Yes, I am afraid you are right...it is the march to upgrade...I am an apple freak and would fork over the money for a shiny new mac, but, there is nothing wrong with my(our) current machines! Am on hold now with support now, will report anything significant

I agree as Photoshop Elements 11 processes my Photo images flawlessly. I have a late 2009 Macbook 6,1. However, I recently replaced the original 250G motion drive with a 500G SSD from OWC.com. I also upgraded the memory to 8G after Apple has been saying for years that my computer can only handle 4G (thanks to the Apple Car senior tech who told me this). Lastly, I just replaced the old swollen battery with a new one. I keep all my photos on an external 4TB hard drive and back them up on an identical TIme Machine drive.

Pardon my rant, but here it goes. The Mac accounts for 8% of Apple's revenues and Apple is close to 8% of the PC market. If they ignore their original product and market horribly, that share of their revenue and their share of the market will erode and it may cost them plus or minus 1% of their revenue in a year. Here is the problem with that. They have a market capitalization that is near a trillion dollars. To fix this one problem with Photos, they would probably need to put five or six good programers on it for about a week. What is wrong with this picture?

I just want to add me to the thread. Same problem here since I upgraded to High Sierra. Starting the edit function take a long time, while in Sierra this was very fast. I have the iCloud photo library turned on, and I can reproduce the problem on two systems, an 2012 iMac with Fusion Drive (which was a fast Mac before upgrading as well), and a new 15inch MBP from 2017 (the top model with the fastest CPU available). For RAW Images it can take up to 20 seconds, for JPEGs it is faster, but still slow. I have the feeling it got a little bit faster with 10.13.3 but the problem is not solved.

So for me the fastest way to edit pictures is to do this on my 2013 iPad Air, where editing works without any delay.

FYI - My Photos library is not in my Dropbox folder - Not sure why this affects my Photos. In fact when my wife logs in, Dropbox app does not start (no icon in task bar)- only my user syncs to a Dropbox folder - yet her Photos experience degrades with Dropbox app installed. Puzzling.

Chip

Good it worked for you but its not the root cause.

I tried creating a new library with 1 single raw file on it or a jpg and still editing a photo was very slow and stuttering on a MBPro 2015 16 gb RAM AND SSD HDD.

I just migrated from Lightroom due to Adobe going subscriptions only to encounter this issue with Photos while processing RAW file. To say I am "disappointed" is a huge understatement made worse by Apple's apparent silence about it. While my 13" Mac is not the newest (mid 2012), it's not the weakest (2.9 Ghz, Core i7, 8GB) and all software is up-to-date. I had thought a new 15" MacBook Pro would be the solution, but the discussion here seems to indicate that might be a waste of money.

Lightroom is great, but I was hoping to return to Photos, with Luminar as a plug-in, to ensure dependable DAM without the loss of edits which occurs wandering from program to program. Is there any sense that Apple is on this?