Very slow processing of raw pictures by Photos

Raw original files are in a 3 Tb external drive.

What format is this drive and how is it connected? If your Photos library on the drive or are you using a referenced library to access them ? (Note that using a referenced library with Photos is not a good idea and is very likely to cause future problems -- :Disadvantages of a Referenced Library in Photos ) What are your iCloud settings?

LN

Raw original files are in a 3 Tb external drive.

How is this drive connected?

And how much free storage is on your system drive?

Are other processes hogging the CPU? If you just moved from Aperture to Photos, the photosanalysisd process will be using most of the CPU cycles to analyze your photos and to classify them according to categories.I would keep the Mac up and running during the night, so the initial analysis will be finished quickly. This can take more than a week for a large library.

I had the same issue and I was abut to give up, then I saw what was causing all the problems

i also came from Aperture, Photos needs first to generate new previews then faces then geotagging it takes a llooooooonnngg time some of the function is done when photos is closed some are when you have it running.

for me it took 48 hrs before it came back to speed

i have done some tested with 40 Raw files it took under 2 minutes to auto enhance in photo and in aperture more less the same time

So give it time and keep a look at the active monitor to see what is taking up most of power from you mac

Henrik

Referenced images are not uploaded to iCloud, only managed images. If you make your referenced library your system photo library, only the photos you consolidate into the library will upload to iCloud.

One last thing: aperture had activity tool to make visible what was going on. Can I see if Photos is working in background in faces recognition or geotagging or something else?

Not directly. Photos is giving you occasionally status information, like "uploading 100 photos, updated just now, or scanning for faces (Check the status of your library in Photos for macOS - Apple Support). But this does not tell you, if the process is currently active, only that work needs to be done.

There are two utilities to look for background processes.

• The Activity Monitor in Applications > Utilities (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201464)
• The Console, also in Applications > Utilities

In the Activity Monitor enter "Photo" in the search field and you will see plenty of processes (daemons) listed. Some of the photos daemons are:

• Photos Agent: That is the parent process handling all other Photos processes, like iCloud synchronisation
• photoanalysisd: This is the artificial intelligence tool to recognize objects and faces in your photos and to classify the photo according to categories. It is needing a lot of processing power.
• com.apple.photos.videoconversionservice: Some videos need to be converted for syncing with iCloud; I'm seeing these conversion services since I started to use HEIC and HEVC codecs
• com.apple.photos.imageconversionservice:
• com.apple.photomoments: organizing the library into moments
• com.apple.photomodel: This process seems to be creating new memories
• com.apple.photoingestservice: I'm seeing this process running, after I import new photos or use editing extensions
• cloudphotosd: updating the iCloud Photo Library
• photolibraryd: This also will be active after using photo editing extensions or external editors

The Console window will give a little more information on the currently running daemons. If you click an item, you will see a brief description of theist action. And the Console will show you error messages and diagnostic messages, that might indicate a problem.

This Console screenshot is showing photolibraryd asking the external editor to release the edited image (I think):

Has someone found some documentation on the process? So far, I could not find any support document explaining the purpose of the different background processes. I just watched them in the Console. And the behavior changed a lot after the upgrade from Sierra to High Sierra,

Hi her sewell I spend the day testing

if you start from zero and re import your photos then it will not slow down, but if you import lets say 5000 photos and once then it dies and gets very slow

I guess if you come from Aperture with 20K plus phots it will take forever to make preview if you use the Mac for other stuff

It's not your Mac.

Photos since High Sierra has been useless to me.

Editing RAW photos in Aperture / Lightroom / Affinity Photo / Photoshop works perfectly. In Photos? It's impossible.

Several people are saying the same.

My current solution right now is going to be:

- Edit in Lightroom.

- Export JPEG files.

- Import to Photos.

Hopefully they fix the performance issues in the next update.

I am experiencing similar "latency" or "responsiveness" issues when editing RAW files. This is related to High Sierra (or the version of Apple Photos that came along with it) because I did not have this problem before.

The RAW files I am working on are about 45MB in size. All my images are stored in iCloud but that shouldn't be an issue because when you edit an image, you should be working on a locally stored version (which is on my main SSD in my case).

The problem I'm having is when making adjustments to RAW files. Whenever I apply a modification to the image using one of the adjustment sliders, the slider itself moves to the location that I chose, but it then takes several seconds before I see a change in the image and you start wondering if you moved the slider enough. You don't get a "processing..." indicator while it is actually working on the image, you are still allowed to move adjustment sliders. So, as a result, you change the slider, don't see anything and think "hmm, I didn't move it enough", move the slider a bit further, 15 seconds later, you see some jittery behaviour. Not workable at all. If I move too many sliders, macOS even stops responding.

I called technical support with this issue and the agent told me he found an existing case for this problem so I guess we can say this is a known issue. We went over my system specifications but nothing looked out of the ordinary. Hopefully they release a fix soon because I'm stuck.

As you can see at this topic High Sierra photo editing slow the Photos app in new Mac OS 10.13 is just crappy and slow. I mean, it's toooooo slow, taking 10, 20, 30... seconds to process one sliding at some bar if you have a 30MB RAW picture.

Sometimes it gets frozen and you and to die and hard reset your Mac.

My iMac is also upgraded with an SSD and has similar specs (only 8GB memory though). According to the call center agent I spoke with, my machine was still adequate in terms of performance and the behaviour we are experiencing was abnormal. I tried Affinity (Photoshop) as an alternative and this worked without any issue on my RAW files. If all my images were not in iPhotos already, I would have switched to an alternative by now. It does make you re-think if it is wise to put everything in iCloud though.

I hear you

well you could try to do a repair if something is wrong

I just lost some photos but the scanner of faces had been stuck for some time

did you repair you aperture liberay before you converted it

I hope get on to this soon since this is a pain in the neck

It is driving me completely nuts how slow Photos has got under High Sierra and how it is making the fans on my MacBook Pro and iMac spin up hard. It's so bad I've had to get an app called "App Police" to throttle the Photos processes. I do have a large library of 200,000+ images and many of them RAW, but it was never this bad before.

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.

A bit off topic. I just migrated from Aperture and one library with 60k photos is taking forever to scan the photos for faces. In the last 12 hours, 100 photos scanned. 644 total in several days (not on all the time, but most).

2015 MacBook Pro 16B. Drive is 8GB Seagate Expansion Desktop connected via USB3. Drive was reformatted and the only thing on the drive is the Photos library. Memory Pressure is green. Over about one minute, CPU jumps around between 27 and 128%. In past three days, Photos has been off maybe 10 hours while the MBP was being used off-site. This is not the system library; it's a library with older photos. System drive (500GB SSD) has 130GB free. A mix of jpg and RAW.

A bit off topic.

Actually it has nothing to do with this thread - For new topics it is rude and not productive to threadjack other's threads - having multiple people post totally different questions in the same thread is very confusing for everyone - please start your own thread for you totally different question -- Writing an effective Apple Support Communities question

LN