How big is your Photos library and how well does it perform?

[Febs]

Hi all,

I've started a thread over in the Mac Mini forum about whether or not I should upgrade my 2012 Mac Mini (or just get an SSD to replace the existing spinner), and one of the things I want to improve is my current Photos experience, which is painfully slow. I'm keen to get an idea of whether or not my performance issues with Photos (which is basically just a general slowness in everything from copying images to loading albums to clicking on menus!) are more related to my Mac, or the Photos app itself...

...and so to that end, I'd love to know:

1. How big is your Photos library?
2. What Mac do you run it from?
3. How would you rate the performance?

Mine is ~200gb and 50,000 photos (and some iPhone videos). Performance on my 2012 Mac Mini (16gb RAM, 1Tb spinner HDD, 2.3GHz quad core i7) is shockingly bad, almost unusable.

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,
Febs.

 

[Febs]

Would love to hear others’ experiences!

 

[stephenschimpf]

I've got about 20,000 photos and videos taking up about 150 GB of iCloud space. Photos on my 2015 iMac with 16GB and 2TB Fusion Drive is great. Based on my experience with my girlfriend's older Mac Mini with a 1 TB spinner HD, I'd say that's the problem right there, although her system is definitely usable.

 

[BigMcGuire]

After cleaning, pruning, and getting rid of duplicates, I took a 173GB amount of photos from Google Photos and put them into an iCloud Photo database. It ended up being 200+GB after it was done - some 97,000 photos and videos. I've spent the last 3 months removing duplicates, found out that Google Photos takeout had duplicates from shared albums / auto edit photos...

So now I'm sitting at a 58,596 photos and 1,523 videos at 122.65 GB.

I'm running on a 2017 MBP 13' TB. Photos has always been blazing fast, no lag, no problem scrolling through the photos. A+ performance. Now I just wish I had tagged/put my photos into albums from my Google days .

My guess is, like poster before me, is your spinner vs SSD is the problem.

 

[Febs]

Thanks everyone! Time to rip it open and install an SSD I think. Interestingly, only in the last day, performance has gotten noticeably better. I think photos has finally stopped indexing / “doing its thing” after a reformat and reinstall about a month ago!

Cheers
Febs.