Photos Troubles

[tapio]

What can I do to make Photos App scroll smooth (if that's possible). All my photos and videos are simply in chronological order over the years, just a few organized in separate albums. So when trying to scroll All Photos, the spinning wheel appears while loading more pictures and so on. I have about 26,000 photos and 430 videos, about 30 min in length on average. Is this maxing out my Macs capability? The 1TB hard disk has about half space left so not maxed out. 8GB Memory.

 

[MacInWin]

Is the drive a rotational drive and how is it attached? The spinner is normally caused by the machine waiting for the drive to provide the data it has been requested to provide (the image files). It's not necessarily Photos that is slow, as much as it is the storage device.

 

[tapio]

Is the drive a rotational drive and how is it attached? The spinner is normally caused by the machine waiting for the drive to provide the data it has been requested to provide (the image files). It's not necessarily Photos that is slow, as much as it is the storage device.

By storage device do you mean the original built in hard drive? It's a 1TB SATA disk. I am not using an external drive to access photos.

 

[MacInWin]

Yes, I presume it's not an SSD, right? Your machine is 8 years old, if it is the one in your profile, and the drive is probably a rotating drive, which will be slow to read with a large database in Photos. The phenomenon you see all points to the drive being the bottleneck.

 

[chscag]

By storage device do you mean the original built in hard drive? It's a 1TB SATA disk. I am not using an external drive to access photos.

In addition to what Jake said, here's some advice: Make sure you have a reliable backup of that hard drive which contains all your photos and videos. Actually, several backups would even be better.

 

[MacInWin]

+1 for that ^^^^!

If the drive is getting slower, that is one of the few signals you will get that it may be failing. So if you do NOT have a backup, make one immediately!

 

[tapio]

+1 for that ^^^^!

If the drive is getting slower, that is one of the few signals you will get that it may be failing. So if you do NOT have a backup, make one immediately!

Yes I have an external SSD drive that has a backup of the computer and photos. I am gonna try accessing the photos from the external drive and see if things run smoother in Photos.

 

[tapio]

Yes the Photos scrolls and runs smooth as silk from the external drive. Why didn't I think about trying that before. So the internal drive is the bottleck. Thanks for all reply's. Anyway I am waiting for the new large screen Mac to hopefully come out this fall so I can upgrade.

 

[MacInWin]

One caution: Is this backup copy a Time Machine backup or something else? I ask because if you try to write to a TM backup, it can (and most likely will) destroy the backup integrity. If the backup is a clone or just a copy, that is ok, but if it's inside a TM backup, that's not ok.

 

[tapio]

One caution: Is this backup copy a Time Machine backup or something else? I ask because if you try to write to a TM backup, it can (and most likely will) destroy the backup integrity. If the backup is a clone or just a copy, that is ok, but if it's inside a TM backup, that's not ok.

I back upped this manually so no TM thing. When I got the external drive my plan was to free the computer from all photos to speed up its thing. But now I can't see myself deleting the photos from the internal drive out of fear of loosing years of memories.

 

[MacInWin]

I understand completely. What I do with my pictures is that they are actually on four different locations. I have the internal drive with Photos, then that is backed up to an external drive as part of Time Machine, and also backed up by Carbon Copy Cloner to a second external drive and finally I use CCC to make a copy of the photos database to a network storage device. So, four copies. I lost my internal drive a few years ago and on that very same day my one backup drive died and I lost 10 years of pictures. Since then I have four copies. Yes, I'm paranoid.

 

[jpdemers]

Time Machine is more than a bit dicey when it comes to archiving old files. When moving to a new Mac, in particular, it's a real challenge to get TM to properly retrieve the old stuff - and you may not notice it's gone until the day comes that you need it. I too have multiple backups, on multiple drives, plus in the cloud ... all on top of TM.

 

[MacInWin]

Time Machine is more than a bit dicey when it comes to archiving old files. When moving to a new Mac, in particular, it's a real challenge to get TM to properly retrieve the old stuff - and you may not notice it's gone until the day comes that you need it. I too have multiple backups, on multiple drives, plus in the cloud ... all on top of TM.

I've never had a problem with TM restoring old files. In fact, it's much easier to use than the cloners, even with the archiving turned on. The only time I've had issues with TM was when I had the backup on a NAS and it got corrupted. The sparsebundle format doesn't recover well from corruption and I had to start all over. However, on a locally attached drive TM works well for me.

 

[chscag]

I've never had a problem with TM restoring old files. In fact, it's much easier to use than the cloners, even with the archiving turned on.

I'll second what Jake said. I've never had a problem with restoring old files with Time Machine nor have I had a problem using it to migrate my data to a newer Mac.