High Sierra photo editing slow

The problem with editing in Photos has not changed since the latest update for me either. The biggest problem I have is with the retouch tool which is basically useless. what I have been doing to cope with the problem is to use a program called Snapheal to do retouching (called erase in Snapheal) which seems to be as good or slightly better than Photos retouch (when it was working). I then reimport the photo into Photos to do the rest of the editing. Not ideal but it works. Incidentally I have tried all the fixes recommended over the past few months, none of which worked but only took a lot of time to do.

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.

I had opened a bug report at Apple development which they closed because the error would have been solved since 10.13.4.
Clearly this is not solved yet, so I've reopened the bug report.

Br,

Ruben

Confirmed - Apple has captured a report from my box with Apple tools and you know what - Apple Support employee confirmed to me, that he experienced the same issue with Photo touching on his new built Mac. Keep the fingers crossed that Apple will find the issue. FYI - There is no issue with Adobe Lightroom...

I'm experiencing this problem on the brand new Imac my employer just purchased for me to use at work. As my main job of editing many jpeg photos throughout the day, I am reduced to dread and frustration with using this newest version of Photos on High Sierra. The old iPhoto program I was using from 2009 was actually working better! The main tool I use and need is the retouching tool. After 5-10 retouches on the same picture it starts to become exceeding slow, where I have to wait 10 seconds or more to see the result, and then it will only then actually do the retouching half the time. Then, all the other editing features become equally as slow, and it continues to lag, practically unusably, until I can save and close, or force close, and then reopen. As frustrating as this this is, it's helpful to know it's a widespread issue. Does/Will it help to contact customer care? This is beyond frustrating and totally unacceptable for a new machine!!

Interesting suggestion, but I don't think it is GPU related. My 2011 iMac has an AMD Radeon HD 6770M GPU and my 2013 MacBook Air uses Intel HD Graphics 4000. Both computers have problems editing the same raw files, even with 10.13.4. Also, I can see massive processor use when trying to edit raw files. This does not seem to happen at the point when the image would be displayed, but while a tool or the image itself is loading. It is not clear from several discussions if the latest system update to 10.13.4 fixes the problem with folks who have problems with jpegs. It certainly does not fix my problems with raw files.

New iOS has crippled my editing process! 20 second lags with every adjustment!

1. Is Apple working on a bug fix?

2. Is reverting back to old iOS possible and helpful?

3. What other “easy” photo editing software is everyone using while this gets fixed? (Don’t day Lightroom)

Any help is appreciate, I’m dead in the water!

I'm not aware or familiar with any problems with iOS for iPhone or iPad. Slow editing in High Sierra has been reported by many users here and Apple is aware of the problem. Some have suggested that 10.13.4 fixed their problems editing jpeg files, but that is not confirmed. I have only had problems editing raw files from one specific camera and there has been no fix yet. The new version 3.0 Photos introduced with High Sierra around October does change the structure of the library database, so if you do revert to 10.12 Sierra and the older bug free version of Photos, you will not be able to open your current Photos library with that old version. Is your problem with jpegs or raw? My solution has been to shoot in raw+jpeg and just work with the jpeg files in Photos for now. If you have updated to 10.13.4 and are still having problems with jpegs, you can edit them with another program. I've used Pixelmator and DxO Optics. Both offer more tools than the editor inside Photos. There is also Affinity and Photoshop Elements, but I've not tried either. These options are not designed for organizing your photos like Lightroom or Apple Photos though.

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.

There are probably a number of issues that cause slowness in Photos. It sounds like you were having a general slowness with your Fusion Drive. With a 120GB library, Photos would have to be storing your photos on the hard drive and I could see how that would lead to a general slowdown. Many in this conversation, are having problems using specific tools while editing. In my case Photos is quite fast when using tools other that DxO Optics Extension and the Retouch tool and even those tools work with jpegs and raw files from my Sony RX100. Everything slows to a crawl when I use those tools on raw files from my Olympus OMD M5 mark I. My 85GB photos library is on the same fast SSD as my system and Photos application, so not a hard drive problem in my case. My wife's MacBook Air has the same specific problem and it has a very fast 512GB SSD. Both of our drives are formatted APFS since High Sierra. It is my understanding Fusion drives do not support APFS yet, but that's probably not relevant. Until High Sierra, my experience was that Photos was faster than either iPhoto and Aperture. That all changed with version 3.0 of Photos.

KBQuick wrote:

Does reverting back to old iOS fix the lag problems?

No - IOS version has nothing at all to do with this issue - IOS is only for mobile devices and has nothing to do with this thread which is about OS X High Sierra on a Mac and does not involve mobile devices or iOS in any way - and you can not really revert back on Mac OSs since the Photos library can not be opened with older software - you would have to also go back to the previous Photos Library which is generally not an acceptable or even available option

LN

I just got a response from my bug report requesting that I upload a sysdiagnose and raw file from my camera. I was able to reproduce a one minute freeze right before generating the sysdiagnose and also sent the raw file that caused it. Previously, when I spoke to tech support on the phone, I was not asked to send any files. Fingers crossed that they are getting closer to a solution.

I have found when working on raw images that Photo is even slower than when working on jpg images. It is basically unusable on High Sierra from my iMac. To be fair my iMac is from 2013 with 8gb of ram and a 1tb SSD. Not a high-end machine.

To test if it was the machine I just tried Adobe Lightroom CC -- and it is fast, works great. Clearly an issue with Photo and not an OSX or iMac HW issue.

I have over 10,000 images and not enough room on my Mac to export them all and import them to Adobe -- but I am considering buying an external drive and taking the time to do just this.

Very frustrating when a company that claims to make computers that "just work" releases software that just does not work.

I just updated to High Sierra 10.13.5 and the update has not solved my problem with slow editing in Photos with raw files. Photos app was 3.0 (3271.13.150) before and after the update. Apple Support told me they were aware of the problem many months ago. They keep saying they are working on a fix. It has been 8 months since this bug was introduced in Version 3.0 of Photos.

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