Artifacts in edited pictures in Photos

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Level 1

11 points

Artifacts in edited pictures in Photos

Editing pictures in Photos sometimes gives strange results. Approximately one out of fifteen pictures will have strange artifacts in them as shown below. When going back to the picture to edit, the artifact will usually disappear. Saving this edit might clear the problem or often it also comes back.

Unfortunately, the artifacts are also persistent in exported pictures, making anything edited useless.

The problem primarily seems to occur when editing multiple pictures in a row. It appears that Photos puts thumbnail generation in some sort of queue and that the artifacts occur because the system is overloaded somehow.

I have a Mac mini (Mid 2011, 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB running macOS High Sierra version 10.13.1). Photos is running at version 3.0 (3231.11.210). The problem also occurred on Sierra, I actually hoped that upgrading to High Sierra, with the newest version of Photos, would solve the problem.

I have tried the following:

Editing each picture, reverting to the original and recreating the edits. This is a hit and miss; sometimes it solves the problem, sometimes it does not.
Repairing the Photos library as described here. This did not appear to help.

Any ideas what is causing this or how to solve it?

Mac mini, macOS High Sierra (10.13.1), null

Posted on Nov 18, 2017 6:14 AM

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Answer 1

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Nico M Author

Level 1

11 points

Nov 19, 2017 1:09 PM in response to léonie

Unfortunately, the problem does not appear to be solved. Yesterday I went ahead and edited about 20 pictures consecutively. After finishing this, I browsed back through the pictures I just edited and saw 2 out of ~20 that had artifacts.

Today I created a new (empty) library and imported all the pictures from the album of our vacation (194 pictures). Again I started editing about 20 pictures consecutively. After browsing back again I noticed a couple of pictures with artifacts. Already the 4th photo that I edited looked like this:

I have the feeling that the problem is more likely to occur when Photos is still generating thumbnails and I continue editing and/or looking at other pictures as indicated by this symbol:

Is it possible to report this problem to Apple somehow?

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

194,969 points

Nov 18, 2017 12:20 PM in response to Nico M

Is your photos library on a supported drive (locally connected, formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled))? If not, test with a new empty library on your system drive drive, just with a few new photos. Can you edit when using a new library?

Does the problem persist, if you are restarting the Mac in Safe Mode?

See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262

If the problem does not persist in Safe mode, you may have incompatible software installed.

Then test in another user account, to see, if the incompatible software is only used from your user account.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204443S

If the artifacts come back, even in safe mode, your Mac may have a problem with the RAM or with the graphics card. Run a hardware test.

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Answer 3

Nico M Author

Level 1

11 points

Nov 18, 2017 6:40 AM in response to léonie

The library is on the internal drive of the Mac mini (Macintosh HD) and is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I forgot to mention that I already ran a hardware test a couple of days ago as described here.

I will try restarting my Mac in Safe Mode and see what that brings.

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Answer 4

Nico M Author

Level 1

11 points

Nov 18, 2017 12:59 PM in response to Nico M

I booted into Safe Mode and to my surprise there were artifacts even on the login screen (striping). Then I remembered that officially the resolution I am using (Dell P2415Q capable of 3840 x 2160, i.e., "retina") is not officially supported for this Mac mini (although in practice it seems to work).

I decided to switch to an officially supported resolution (1920 x 1080) and it appears so far that this has solved the problem. I went back and edited the pictures I posted above and these are now free of artifacts (after reverting to the original and redoing edits).

In the coming days I will perform some more edits to see if the problem is indeed gone.

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Answer 5

léonie

Level 10

194,969 points

Jan 4, 2018 6:14 AM in response to Nico M

To report a problem or bug to Apple use the feedback form:

Apple - Photos - Feedback

If you want to report with much detailed - screenshots, system configuration you could use the bug reporter of the developer forum: Detailed and Effective Bug Reporting | Apple Support Communities

But you would need to sign up for a free developer account. This way you will receive a case number and a reply, if the problem is fixed.

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Answer 6

Nov 19, 2017 5:17 AM in response to Nico M

Weird stuff happens if digital cameras and cards become damaged or corrupted or require updates so the problem might not be your computer's. I can't help beyond pointing out that you can run Disk Utility on your card or even the camera if it is plugged directly into your computer.

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Answer 7

Nico M Author

Level 1

11 points

Nov 19, 2017 1:00 PM in response to Ewan Lamont

Thanks for the suggestion, Ewan. However, I don't think that the camera could be the issue here. This particular album from our vacation contains pictures from a camera (Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX100), my iPhone SE and my wife's iPhone 6s. All the originals are fine and I have seen the artifacts appear at least on both the pictures from the camera and my iPhone.

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Answer 8

dee173

Level 1

4 points

Dec 16, 2017 4:03 AM in response to Nico M

Thanks a lot for posting this. I have the same problem since updating from El Capitan to High Sierra. I was worried that it might be the SSD packing in, but now believe it to be a bug in the Photos app.

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Answer 9

Dec 21, 2017 7:42 PM in response to léonie

I have had this issue for some time, however, I do not edit my photos. If I do any editing I export unmodified originals and use Photoshop Elements. The interesting part is I downloaded some photos Sunday and some a few weeks back and had no artifacts in either album, but today I have one in each. This is definitely a Photos issue that needs to get fixed because I thought this was a memory card issue with my D3200, but I doubt that is the case when they look fine on the camera. I am still hope for Aperture to return

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Answer 10

Dec 22, 2017 1:36 AM in response to ChildofGod81

I have not noticed this particular issue with my photos but recently I have found Photos glitchy. It seems to take a long time for some edits to be saved and sometimes Photos just quits for unknown reasons.

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Answer 11

Ophi

Level 1

4 points

Dec 22, 2017 9:24 AM in response to Nico M

I actually spent a couple hours earlier this week on the phone with a couple of senior support people from Apple (one of whom interfaces directly with the Photos engineering team). In my case, it’s definitely Photos that’s the problem (specifically the ImageConversionService in the background) that’s mangling the JPEG versions. You will probably see messages in the Console to the tune of something like “num is not a CFNumberType”(that’s from memory, not verbatim). As near as we could tell, it was completely isolated to RAW photos (JPEGs from my iPhone camera were wholly unaffected). My system is relatively old (2011 MBP) so it’s often under pretty high load when running Photos, which seemed to contribute to the problem. In retrospect, it might be a race condition between the UI trying to display the thumbnails before the conversion service is completely done generating the JPEG.

After we ran it through some diagnostics, including exporting the unmodified originals of 3 images and importing to an empty new Photos library, things seemed to have settled where the Revert, Edit, Save loop would fix the affected pictures as a workaround.

One thing that they suggested was to run the Photos Repair sequence (launch Photos with Cmd+Option+Click) a couple of times in a row. It basically forces a couple of passes where something repaired in the first pass may allow the second pass to completely fix things. Even for large libraries, the second pass should go pretty quickly.

Finally, the folks at Apple Support were fantastic and I highly recommend setting up a call with them at http://apple.co/GetSupport if you want more help getting this resolved. At the very least, it will give the Photos team a better idea of how widespread the problem is so they can investigate and prioritize fixing it.

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Answer 12

LarryHN

Level 10

106,110 points

Dec 22, 2017 10:17 AM in response to Ophi

One thing that they suggested was to run the Photos Repair sequence (launch Photos with Cmd+Option+Click) a couple of times in a row. It basically forces a couple of passes where something repaired in the first pass may allow the second pass to completely fix things. Even for large libraries, the second pass should go pretty quickly.

Before doing this be sure you have a good backup as repairing a severely damaged library can make it worse requiring a good backup to save your photos - and note that if your are using iCloud Photo Library this will always trigger a new total upload of your library to iCloud

LN

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