Photos for Mac Running Slow

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Photos for Mac Running Slow

I am using a late-2013 15-inch MacBook Pro Retina with 16GB of RAM. I am running macOS High Sierra 10.13.3. The Photos library is located on a Samsung T5 external SSD connected via USB 3. Previously the Photos library was stored on a Pegasus R6 external SAS disk. I've tested the Read/Write speeds of the Samsung and Pegasus devices and they are equivalent or faster than the internal 500GB SSD.

Recently, editing has become extremely slow in Photos. I will move a slider and have to wait several seconds for any change to appear on the screen. This has pretty much made Photos unusable for me for post-processing images. In the past I was using Photos for my personal work and Lightroom for my professional work. My Photos library is 245GB. I've tried repairing the library to no avail. Does anyone have any other ideas for how to improve the speed of Photos? If Lightroom were also running extremely slowly, I might think it was time to upgrade my MBP, by Lightroom still runs at a reasonable speed.

MacBook Pro, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3)

Posted on Feb 6, 2018 1:45 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Old Toad

Level 10

216,716 points

Feb 16, 2018 9:37 AM in response to tomnorth

To help rule out 3rd party software as culprits download and run Etrecheck. Copy and paste the results into your reply. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.

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Answer 2

Jk100272

Level 1

24 points

Feb 16, 2018 10:33 AM in response to Old Toad

It looks like its fine for me now.

I did reformat the drive right when I got it to become MACOS Extended Journaled

I did 2 things:

I reinstalled the samsung driver, downloaded it from their website and followed the instructions under "No Samsung Portable SSD is connected" during installation to make sure their software recognizes the drive

2nd thing, and I do believe this is the true problem, I disabled the spotlight indexing on the drive. You can exclude locations under system settings/spotlight/privacy

Now it looks like its working fine, it copied 210GB in 10 minutes or so on USB3.0

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Answer 3

tomnorth Author

Level 1

11 points

Feb 16, 2018 11:08 AM in response to Jk100272

The second thing you listed fixed the issue for me. I turned off Spotlight indexing for my Samsung T5 drive and then restarted my computer. I then opened up Photos and started moving sliders. The image updates as I move the slider rather than the lag that was there before. Thanks for this tip.

By the way, I formatted my Samsung T5 SSD as an APFS drive. I saw on a YouTube tutorial that you should format SSDs as APFS and HDDs as MacOS Extended Journaled.

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Answer 4

LarryHN

Level 10

106,142 points

Feb 7, 2018 10:19 AM in response to tomnorth

there are several reports of this n these forums and it appears that the only solution is a software upgrade (some people seem to have found that 10.13.3 helped adn other have not found that) - report to Apple Product Feedback - Apple

LN

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Answer 5

tomnorth Author

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11 points

Feb 7, 2018 11:00 AM in response to tomnorth

I created a test Photos library stored on the SSD in my MBP and imported a few dozen RAW files. I then opened one up to edit it. I had the same issue. It took over 20 seconds for the image to update when I moved a slider. Clearly, there is some issue with Photos that is not entirely related to the size of the library or whether the library is an iCloud Photo Library.

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Answer 6

tomnorth Author

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11 points

Feb 7, 2018 10:10 AM in response to tomnorth

I was working in Photos today editing a photo taken on my Nikon D800. It was taking over 30 seconds to update on the screen when I would move a slider. Eventually it seems to have hung. I looked in Activity Monitor and it said Photos was using around 230% of the CPU, which I assume means it was tying up two to three of the four cores in my MBP. All I was doing was moving the exposure slider.

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Answer 7

tomnorth Author

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11 points

Feb 7, 2018 10:18 AM in response to tomnorth

Another bit of information. I opened up the same file in the Edit mode in Photos and then watched what happened with the Activity Monitor. The following three processes were tying up around 300% of the CPU: Photos, photoanalysisd, and photolibraryd.

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Answer 8

Jk100272

Level 1

24 points

Feb 16, 2018 9:07 AM in response to tomnorth

I have this issue too. I switched from 500GB T3 to 1TB T5.

I think write speeds on huge files are slowed to a crawl. When I tried copying the library to the new drive I ran into lots of issues.

I might need to return the drive, not useable like this.

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Answer 9

tomnorth Author

Level 1

11 points

Feb 7, 2018 10:25 AM in response to LarryHN

Sorry, I searched on this and didn't find anything recent. I'll have to search harder. I am running 10.13.3. I will report this though. Thanks for the link.

Tom

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Photos for Mac Running Slow

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