I own a late 2014 (fixed) Retina iMac in the following configuration: iMac 27; 3.5GHz Quad-Core i5; 5K Display; 1TB Fusion Drive; 8GB. I believe when I purchased it, I restored a backup from my previous iMac rather than starting fresh (so it's possible some previous errors transferred over). Over the years, it has gotten slower and slower. It's to the point now where I'm waiting on it (significantly) more than I'm actively using it. It's running the current Mojave release.
What really prompted me to notice this (and look for a solution) is that I recently decided to begin using Apple Photos (I'd previously been manually organizing my photos in folders since the late 1990's.) and have been importing 70,000+ photos and videos and uploading them all to iCloud. The computer has been on and working at this for months now, and I see no end in sight. It still has over 15,000 photos to upload (At least, that's what it's telling me. It's probably more.) and is averaging a few a day, literally.
While performing other tasks, it has been dreadfully slow as well. Ex: I can't use the built-in Archive Utility anymore to unzip files because I have to wait minutes for it to unzip even a 50 kb file. Most third party apps seem to run fine: it's primarily the OS and built-in apps/tools that are impossible to use.
The other day, I ran the First Aid tool within Disk Utility a few times as it was finding and correcting errors. I have not yet ran it within Safe Mode or Recovery Mode, but plan to do so tonight. The hard drive is getting rather full: roughly 50 GB free. This is partially because of the photo transfer I'm doing: it's copying each media file to the Photos Library. Once everything has transferred/uploaded (and I triple check it all), I'll archive the original photo folders on an external hard drive and delete them from the iMac.
What else can I do to try and speed up this computer? I know that I could reformat it and manually copy things back from my Time Machine backup, but I'd prefer not to do that at this time (as I may upgrade to a newer iMac the next time Apple refreshes the line and could it then instead). Are there other good scanning utilities I can use? Do you think it's primarily the low disk space? I have a MacBook Pro for work that I could potentially use to speed up the Photos uploads, if that's possible and could be part of the problem.
Any help/advice at all is appreciated! I'm about to pull all of my hair out... it's gotten so frustrating.
What really prompted me to notice this (and look for a solution) is that I recently decided to begin using Apple Photos (I'd previously been manually organizing my photos in folders since the late 1990's.) and have been importing 70,000+ photos and videos and uploading them all to iCloud. The computer has been on and working at this for months now, and I see no end in sight. It still has over 15,000 photos to upload (At least, that's what it's telling me. It's probably more.) and is averaging a few a day, literally.
While performing other tasks, it has been dreadfully slow as well. Ex: I can't use the built-in Archive Utility anymore to unzip files because I have to wait minutes for it to unzip even a 50 kb file. Most third party apps seem to run fine: it's primarily the OS and built-in apps/tools that are impossible to use.
The other day, I ran the First Aid tool within Disk Utility a few times as it was finding and correcting errors. I have not yet ran it within Safe Mode or Recovery Mode, but plan to do so tonight. The hard drive is getting rather full: roughly 50 GB free. This is partially because of the photo transfer I'm doing: it's copying each media file to the Photos Library. Once everything has transferred/uploaded (and I triple check it all), I'll archive the original photo folders on an external hard drive and delete them from the iMac.
What else can I do to try and speed up this computer? I know that I could reformat it and manually copy things back from my Time Machine backup, but I'd prefer not to do that at this time (as I may upgrade to a newer iMac the next time Apple refreshes the line and could it then instead). Are there other good scanning utilities I can use? Do you think it's primarily the low disk space? I have a MacBook Pro for work that I could potentially use to speed up the Photos uploads, if that's possible and could be part of the problem.
Any help/advice at all is appreciated! I'm about to pull all of my hair out... it's gotten so frustrating.
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that this takes care of it!