Photos window not opening and application not responding
For the past few days, my photos application window will not open. The black dot below the icon on the dock shows up and the "Photos" application menu appears at the top left, but when I hover my cursor over it, it only shows the spinning color wheel. I have to force quit the application. Upon research, I saw solutions to open it with option-command or to delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences, but neither option works.
Also, not sure if this is related, but this issue seems to also affect my screen saver. Both when the screensaver itself activates and in the settings app, it continues to say "loading photos", but it never loads.
I haven't downloaded anything or changed any settings that I believe would have affected it, so I can't tell what caused this issue.
MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013), macOS High Sierra (10.13.4)