Looking for some suggestions here of what else I should be checking/trying. My spouse is using a MBA M4, maxed out on ram and storage. She has a large photos library (1.3Gigs or so) sync’d to iCloud. Photos is set to keep originals locally. (That was the first thing I checked that she’s not optimizing photo storage.)
At times the Photos app really bogs down and is unusably slow for even simple edits like cropping. It’s quite frustrating.
Edited to add: in Activity Monitor the process photolibraryd ramps up to just under 100% during the freezes and then goes back down to much lower when Photos starts responding again.
What else can I be checking toward trying to identify what is going on? Any suggestions welcome toward ultimately resolving this.
Thanks, they are not significantly. (Corespotlightd is using 100-200%, but there’s plenty of unused CPU.) photolibraryd must be single threaded as it never goes over 100% and seems to just get pinned at 100% during the freezes.
Also, as another data point toward checking if it was a network/icloud thing, we turned off wifi to ensure there was no network connectivity. That did not change the behaviour. Photos still reliably froze up for tens of seconds at a time with photolibraryd pegging at about 100%.
I don’t think it’s a network thing either (instinctively) but shutting off Wifi doesn’t prove that as if the app expects to have network connectivity and hasn’t been developed to fail gracefully, it could still be waiting to connect to the network.
That is a BIG library, Something is likely putting stress on the system
You don’t say:
how long your Wife has had the Mac, e.g. did you just set it up last week or has it been in place for months with a similar sized photo library.
the type of actions the user it taking at the time it slows down, scrolling the library? editing a photo? it doesn’t seem to make a difference what the user is doing?
Can you “cause” the slow down deliberately?
When scrolling through the library, does the library “keep up” or do the photos look blank while it catches up?
Are the photos stored on the internal SSD or on an external drive?
If external, SSD or Spinning hard drive? What connection the external hard drive has to the computer (USB 2,3,thunderbolt 3,4,5…?
If internal SSD, how large is the SSD (I think that the MBA maxes out at 2TB) how much space does it have free? If you’re less than 10% that could be causing issues?
How large are the photos that your wife is taking? iPhone with all the settings at Max, DSLR with a 48MP sensor and RAW photos
Are there lots of videos in the library?
How much memory is in use and how much swap space is allocated?
The Reality is that with a library that big and depending on some of the answers you may provide, you may be trying to achieve a Pro level workload/workflow which, while the MBA M4 is a brilliant computer, the laptop is not built to handle.
Why not turn on the option to optimize photos storage on Mac and see if that makes a difference? I have a 950GB photos library that can’t fit on my M2 MBA with 8GB RAM but it works fine on it with optimized storage.
That is a thought. I wanted to avoid optimize so that she doesn’t have network delays waiting for full resolution photos to load, and so that backups of her computer contain the entire library. (The latter is quite important to me.) Thanks for the suggestion.
Fingers crossed, I think I’ve found a solution, which I’ll post momentarily.
Thanks for the responses, that’s a good point about the network connectivity.
I (fingers crossed) think we have found the fix, which was to repair her photo library by holding ⌥ ⌘ when opening the Photos app and choosing the “Repair” option. Since having done this the freezes have ceased. Fingers crossed that holds true beyond this first hour or two of use post-repair.
For anyone coming across this thread in the future, and to answer some of your questions:
The library is almost entirely iPhone photos taken with default settings. Only a relatively small amount of video.
The library is stored on the internal 2Gig drive of the MBA M4 with 600+ gigs free. (There’s very little on the drive other than photo library and basic system/application software.)
This M4 is new as of a few months ago. The library was sync’d down from iCloud, not ported over from her prior laptop.
She reports the freezes were also happening on her prior laptop.
One could reasonably reliably cause the freezes with basic edits like cropping and adjusting colors. The freeze would happen when you were done with the edit. The freezes seemed to come in two flavours, one where there was a white progress circle that slowly completed, but would hang for a minute or two to complete it’s last little bit and a second that was just a spinning beach ball for a minute or two.
Responsiveness while scrolling in the library was fine.
My suspicion is now that there was something wrong in the Photos library as stored in iCloud, not just locally, that the repair-library has now fixed.
You could try an app like powerphotos and split the library up. That may help. my library is not as large as your wife’s, but I found that once I stripped the videos and RAW out of my geberal library it did become a little snappier.
Thanks. Going to look into PowerPhotos. The rebuild worked for a week or so. Now Photos is back to having long stalls, even worse than before. Super frustrating. Thanks, -Henry
Same situation here on multiple machines. After 20 seconds or so of waiting, I force quit Photos and reopen. It works fine from then on. For a few minutes.
In our case Photos does eventually come back without the force quit, it just takes a while. Whether force-quit or just waiting the behavior does not go away temporarily. Super frustrating.