iOS 11.3 - Photos excessive background activity/battery drain

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.

But won't the optimized photos and videos be of lower resolution in your phone?

I also understand that optimized photos and video taken long ago in your camera roll will take some time to appear when you want to view it.

That's the idea, but I can't tell the difference. I did this because I was desperate. I can't have my phone dying all day on me at work and I can't carry spare batteries everywhere either. I have resisted this forever and even always buy the bigger memory phones to keep all my photos accessible, but it seems to be fine. It just has to finish scanning faces again now, which takes weeks, but only happens when the phone is plugged in so it doesn't suck battery.

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.

I thought it was resolved as mentioned in my previous reply. But it came back after 2 weeks of being normal. I updated to ios 11.4, but the problem still remains. I have no idea what's updating in the background. It seems like it's never finished:( I really hope Apple fixes this.

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.

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

Same problem here after update to 11.3

I have 130.000 photos

This is a disaster. I wiped my phone and restarte it and it is still happening.

I wonder if Apple is monitoring this. Word spreads fast. Need a resolution. My 2 kids just got new phones yesterday. They weren’t iPhones like what they had last week. 😳

With the factory reset you discarded the results of the previous weeks of processing and analyzing the photos and the job has to start over from the beginning.

Exactly. This has been the case with me. Suddenly after no significant changes to the library this started happening.

Can anyone confirm if the iOS 11.4 update (released today) fixes this issue?

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.