High Sierra photo editing slow

Hi All,

I've been debating whether to upgrade my mid 2010 iMac to High Sierra for months and finally took the plunge on Friday.

As discussed above most things work fine but Photos (which was one of the main reasons why I decided to upgrade) is unusable. I've noticed just this morning (Sun 7th Jan) a software update for photos is available so I'll try that, but I'm not hopeful 😟

So my question is if I decide to invest in a years' subscriptions of Lightroom will I have the same speed issues? I don't want to invest more money if Lightroom room will be just as slow.

I'm going to seek advice at the Brighton Apple Store this morning so I'll feed back any information I get from them.

Yep, You're right, thats the version I have to: Version 3.0 (3251.12.190).

Not sure what the update message was then. Something came up in the top right corner so I just selected it.

Photos seems to be a bit faster today but I suppose that could have been down to what others have said about the upgrade eventually finishing all it's work.

I'll keep posting

I had the same experience -- I spent much of Thursday and Friday nights this week online and over the phone with Apple experts, who in the end, told me there wasn't any problem on my iMac (because it didn't stall or quit when they were online with me). I think the last person totally ignored the fact that Photos had crashed TWICE while we were trying to figure the problems out. I think they either don't want to acknowledge that the Photos app is faulty, or they don't know how to fix it so they pretend there's no problem. I've been a life-long Apple buyer, but this has been frustrating to the point where I don't know if I even want to invest in another Mac in the future.

I, too, have some hope now after connecting with a senior Apple advisor who spent a couple hours with me last night and had me upload a screenshot movie of the crashing and other problems. She will give all this information to engineers who will hopefully get another persons view of the Photos problems we're all experiencing. We'll see what happens.

I've been having exactly the same problem and must rely on my iPad and iPhone X to perform daily business which they are ill equipped to perform. Do I assume correctly that the only way to be aware of Apple's success is by monitoring this web site?

Thanks, Carlos, for sharing those very important problems inherent to Sierra downgrading. Losing all those Photo Library modifications doesn't bear considering. So unless Apple or some other wise user comes up with a solution we're doomed to depending on totally inadequate computers. Makes one consider purchasing a second hand unit capable of running Sierra and just loading it with all data except that for Photo. Carbonite could probably handle that chore. That way I'd have a viable computer whose data could be used to update my hopefully repaired iMac with all its photos intact. Does all this make sense?

Yeah I was lucky. When I upgraded to High Sierra late September I noticed the problem in Photos straight away so I got my last Sierra backup from time machine and copied it to my older Sierra iMac so nothing lost.

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 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.

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

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

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.