We got a new iMac for Christmas and it has seemed really slow for the past couple of days. In desperation I checked out Activity Monitor and it shows photoanalysisd as the guilty process that is hogging my CPU. I assume this is related to the Photos app, but that's not even running!
What is "photoanalysisd", why is it using 77% of my CPU, and can I safely stop the process?
Your iMac is currently processing the photos in your Photos library, presumably because you’ve just imported/converted an existing Photos library from an earlier version of macOS.
If you suspect this has been the cause of your sluggishness for a couple of days, then it’s most likely you’ve got a very large photo library and that it’s being processed for the first time on your new iMac.
The fact that Photos isn’t running actually fits with your scenario, as launching the Photos app will pause the photoanalysisd daemon.
Although it takes a long time, once it’s finished your Photos app will be able to perform a lot of advanced functions due to all the metadata etc it’s processed, so I would let it finish what it’s doing.
NOTE:
Should you need to pause the process in order to free up some of your CPU, I would recommend just opening the Photos app for a while and then quitting it when you’re not using the computer. Note, however, that minimising the Photos app will act to restart the photoanalysisd daemon, so just leave it running in the background while you want to keep the daemon paused.
Update for 2019, 16" MacBook Pro running Catalina 10.15.2:
start Photos, let it continue past the first dialogue box;
now Preferences… in the main app menu under Photos just right after Apple logo is clickable (it wasn't before);
Preferences… (⌘+,) → General tab , and untick both check boxes in Memories;
close Photos.
This stops photoanalysisd cold, no reboot or kill required.
After photoanalysisd had been taking up 3 cores for over a month, I found a solution that reduced the CPU usage dramatically for me on High Sierra. I went into Photos and added names to some pictures - 4 pictures in total using 3 names. Photoanalysisd is currently using 0% whether or not Photos is open.
I have only a dozen or so photos in my library (this is my spare computer, my photos are on my main computer) and I've let the process run for a week, and it is still eating up 100% of both cores. My machine is unresponsive with the CPU fan at 100% (13" MacBook Pro Mid-2010). None of the solutions I found on the web worked, I finally temporarily renamed my photo library to hide it from the deamon, and instantly had both CPUs go from 100% to around 5%.
Might I suggest the use of App Tamer?
It lets you pause/stop a process when it reaches a % of the processor time.
Since I use it, my computer temperature is always quite low.
Hope it helps!
P.S.: I am not affiliated at all with App Tamer. I am just a happy customer!
I don't use the Photos app and I have no photos in it. Still, my mac (Catalina) is regularly slow and sluggish due to this process. I've now renamed the Photos library which seems to help. It's annoying constantly having a process running for a feature that is not used. Surely Apple can detect wether they actually need to run this process?
photoanalysisd... in fact, that explains why, in my case, I don't get any pictures on Exchange contacts: it must be checking those with all sorts of tools first, including photoanalysisd, and I suppose that before this daemon finishes its processing, I won't get any images anyway...
Commented
Oct 8, 2021 at 7:52
In my case, it was photolibraryd and not photoanalysisd that was hogging CPU and also causing massive HD churn, but I'd like to provide an answer here that worked for me in stopping photolibraryd, because (1) I think these tips will work for stopping photoanalysisd too, (2) this page is one of the top Google results for people searching for info about photolibraryd, and (3) none of the advice on this page (as of 2021-07-01) worked for me in stopping photolibraryd.
First, I was initially experiencing massive disk churn, particularly disk-writing not reading. This started when I moved the Photos library from one user account to another on the computer. This problem was partially due to the fact that my new account did not own the files inside the Photos Library bundle. I had to open the bundle (go to ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary and right-click it, then choose "Show Package Contents"), Get Info on each subfolder (database/, external/, originals/, etc.), and under the Sharing & Permissions section add my new user account, set its privileges to "Read & Write", and then click the ellipsis-in-a-circle button at the bottom and choose "Apply to enclosed items…". I had previously given myself Read & Write privileges for the overall Photos Library bundle, but this was not enough.
Giving myself R&W access to all the contents stopped the disk-writing churn and the errors that were showing up in Console.app from photolibraryd, however it still continued to dump tons of non-error messages into Console and was reading continuously from the HD at 15MB/s for hours despite the fact that I don't have enough photos to occupy it for more than a couple minutes at that speed.
At this point, the advice here from mbackschat on 2020-01-03 worked instead, which is to rename the folder ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/database to something else (for example, to database.xxx). This confounds photolibraryd so that it stops thrashing the computer. Note that launching Photos after doing this will initiate a "Restoring…" process that recreates database/, so you will have to do this after each time you use Photos.
launchctl disable user/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd
launchctl kill TERM gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd
killall photoanalysisd
restart
if that not help
Just create new file call tcookiped.sh and then run it in terminal sh tcookiped.sh
killall -STOP photoanalysisd
or
while true; do
killall photoanalysisd
sleep 10
done
#killall -ABRT corespotlightd
killall -STOP photoanalysisd once to pause the process might be the better approach than busy-looping to kill the relaunches. Neither solution solves the underlaying problem though.
That process interferes severely with time machine by hogging all available CPU. It is the only process that I encountered so far that is that annoying. Now I finally stop the process manually through Activity Monitor > select CPU > select "photoanalysisd" > click red stop sign in top left – as soon as it starts to interfere with my work. Not a permanent solution, but at least I can use my machine for what it is intended.
