iOS 11.3 - Photos excessive background activity/battery drain

I'm still using ios 11.3. I decided to let the "updating" and "restoring" run for close to 2 weeks, while constantly charging my phone. During that time, I had terrible access to my photos. I had to wait for the photos to download before I could edit them. Also, I was not able to send photos through Whatsapp, Facebook or Instagram because each time I tried, it took forever for the pictures to be attached.

Then one day, I saw the "Update Complete" in the photos app. Since then, everything is back to normal, but it took close to 2 weeks, partly because I had 51k photos and 2.9k videos inside. From time to time, I will see "uploading 41000 photos" in the status bar, then upload complete. Not sure what's going on. But at least the apps and photos are working fine.

Same problem. 1 year old 256 gig iPhone 7plus. 27000 photos. (But that should be irrelevant. Many were put on from my PC.

Are you giving your iPhone enough time over night to get the background processing done?

When you import photos the Photos.app will scan them to recognize faces and objects.If you import 27000 photos at once, it will take many days to complete the scan of the photos. Even my Mac needed two weeks to scan 50000 photos for thousands of categories like birds, Christmas trees, bridges, and more. Give your ipHone time to get the job done and keep it up and running during the night, connected to power.

Yes. It turns out that it with the uodate all the photos need to be re-scanned. I fixed it by going to settings -> Photos -> optimize iphone storage.

This stops the scanning and lets the photos stay on the cloud. I cant actually tell the difference.

My wife is having the same problem on her 6s. (Interestingly, my 6s with the same shares iphoto library is doing fine.)

At the bottom of the photo library screen there was an option to pause uploading photos. She selected that and the battery drain got dramatically better (putting the phone on low power mode also helped significantly.) I haven’t tried the deleting trick yet, but there is clearly some background process in iPhoto that needs some optimization.

Just updated to iOS 11.4.1 which SEEMS to have fixed the problem (as opposed to the original 11.4 release). FINGERS CROSSED.

I think that should not the case: the results (faces etc) are kept in Icloud + synced across devices.

That is wishful thinking. The faces are synced between devices, but Photos is still analyzing the photos on each device again for categories and faces.

mine went away about a day after I did the delete a junk photo then delete from trash.

No idea if it was that or just luck

I have 11.4.1 Beta 2 and issue is now resolved for me and my 1.8GB iCloud Photo Library. Had the issues since 11.3 came out.

Someone on another forum said they got rid of deleted photos in trash and it fixed things.

I have no deleted files in trash so I deleted something and cleared it from trash.

See if it makes things better.

Exact same problem. iPhone 8. ~120,000 photos. Started in iOS 11.3. Wiping phone, re-adding iCloud Photo, replacing with ANOTHER iPhone 8 did not fix. Photos take minutes if not hours to show up in moments. Photos app uses 50% battery in the background. Can’t share or edit photos anymore. This is BANANAS. Have called Apple support multiple times. They are trying to escalate this issue. Sounds like a very documented problem. Will try deleting a ‘junk photo’ and see what happens.

Same issue is plaguing my IOS experience and rendering my Iphone 7 / 256GB into a phone that is always connected to a charger.

Battery info of the last 7 days shows 26 minutes of screen time and 30,9 hours of background activity (52% in total).

• 117000 photos
• 4500 videos
• Icloud Photo Library = on
• Optimise Iphone Storage = on
• Upload to My Photo Stream = off
• Icloud Photo Sharing = on

Same problem with mine just updated to 11.3.1 and same

Battery went flat over night just sitting on my desk.

Anyone have any ideas to get around it as Apple will never mention they have a problem.

Last 24 hours 1 min screen time. 7.9 hours background 62% battery.