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

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

200,675 points

Posted on Nov 18, 2017 12:20 PM

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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16 replies

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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Artifacts in edited pictures in Photos