Photolibraryd memory hogging

[Krayzkat]

Hello.

24 hours ago I upgraded my iMac from El Capitan to High Sierra. I have a 27" late 2010 with 8Gb RAM.

Now I can't get anything done on my computer because a process called 'photolibraryd' is using up all the memory.

In fact, at the moment Activity Monitor is saying that it is using over 28Gb of memory (I only have 8GB of physical memory!)

This has been going on for 1 full day now. I left it on overnight....

I can quit the photolibraryd process but it will start back up again shortly afterwards.

From googling, I understand the photos app is tagging all my photos with faces, objects etc.

According to my iPhone I have about 8000 pictures. I can't open the photos app on iMac as photolibraryd uses up all the memory.

Also from googling, i see others had similar problem but with high CPU usage. The CPU usage my photolibraryd process is using is a low %, rather than the 100's% that some people were experiencing.

Does anyone know roughly how long this process will take to complete so that I can start using my iMac again?

Also, why did Apple not create some type of basic message telling people what was happening?

Ps I am not someone who takes lots of pictures. I take a probably lower than a average amount on my iPhone and they sync across iCloud. I suspect the 8000 photos I supposedly have are multiple copies of the same picture
[doublepost=1508417915][/doublepost]Here is a picture I took on my iPhone (a screen grab on iMac was out of the question)

 

[dianeoforegon]

Its processing the facial recognition for the "people" album. It only runs when you are connected to power, so it wont kill your battery.
If you click on the "people" album you can see its progress (note that it will not continue processing while the app is open)

See this discussion for more info: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7721043?start=0&tstart=0

 

[Krayzkat]

Just replying as I forgot to update the thread at the time......

It took about 3/4 days for my iMac to finally become usable again. Once it had finished its facial recognition scanning it has been working fine.

I’m still annoyed at Apple for not giving any warning that this would happen, or allowing the user to ‘pause’ this process if they had some important work to do.

Also, to the poster above /\ my iMac is always plugged into power as it isn’t a laptop.....

 

[zpjet]

Hi, I’ve recently had a problem with photolibraryd eating a lot of CPU and memory (up to 45 GB), even after upgrade to Sonoma 14.1 and removing the system library.

It turned out the problem wasn’t with my library or my iCloud. What helped immediately was getting rid of

~/Library/Photos/Libraries/Syndication.photoslibrary

which, from a quick web search, is a library for Shared Albums (I don’t think it’s for Shared Library as it seems to go back a few years).

I moved it to bin - with command-backspace, and force-quitting the photolibraryd in Activity Monitor - then restarted and everything went to normal, with my M2 Pro not spinning fans and not getting warm, once again.

I wish I found out about that other library earlier - only when inspecting the process in Activity Monitor, with Open Files and Ports, I found there’s this other Syndication library.

My full discovery process https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255232066