Laggy Photos after upgrade to El Capitan

[Micky Do]

I have just gotten around to updating my early 2009 Mac Mini (base 2 Ghz model with an extra 4 GB of RAM, for a total of 5 GB) from Mountain Lion to El Capitan. I stuck with Mountain Lion so long because it was fine for my needs; I had no need of the connectivity and other features offered by more recent versions. However, some websites were no longer working well with Safari (including MacRumors!), and Opera (which I have used with them) had an update and no longer worked with OS X 8.5.

I'm reasonably pleased with how most apps work, but not Photos.

With Mountain Lion, iPhoto worked well, and was fine for my needs. I use a Fujifilm X20 to take shots of sports for websites and Facebook pages, as well as some for the local press. The 12mp files are not too demanding, and there was no perceptible lag when editing them.

Different story with El Capitan and Photos. The lagginess is quite marked, and makes editing difficult to say the least.

Is there anything I can do to improve the situation?

 

[akash.nu]

Go back to mountain lion.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Is there anything I can do to improve the situation?"

SSD, if you don't already have one installed...

 

[Micky Do]

Go back to mountain lion.

Yeah, and be back where I was with the problems arising from using an older version of Safari, and not being able to use the latest version of Opera.

Could be worth considering Mavericks or Yosemite, whichever is most recent before the change was made from iPhoto to Photos. Can any one enlighten me?

"Is there anything I can do to improve the situation?"

SSD, if you don't already have one installed...

Yes, I know your opinion that SSD is the solution to all the world's problems. It would make for faster opening of Photos, and more snappy retrieval of albums and images. I can live with a bit of lag there. However SSD is unlikely to make any difference to lagginess in editing, as once an album or image is open, it is all about processing in the CPU and RAM, not storage.

 

[TonyC28]

Editing in Photos on my mid-2011 iMac with 12 GB RAM has been rendered useless since updating to High Sierra. Perhaps our machines are getting a little too old to handle the new features.

 

[Micky Do]

Editing in Photos on my mid-2011 iMac with 12 GB RAM has been rendered useless since updating to High Sierra. Perhaps our machines are getting a little too old to handle the new features.

After a couple of days and a few times playing around with it, Photos has become somewhat useable, though still not as simple and user friendly as iPhoto was. I did switch off the iCloud link and a couple of other features that are extraneous from my point of view. That may have helped.

A friend reckons that after an upgrade it can take a little time and use before a Mac gets files and so on sorted..... He hopes so, having just updated his 3 year old iMac to High Sierra, and it is quite sluggish at present.

I am not impressed by the few editing adjustments that the version of Photos that comes with El Capitan comes with; iPhoto had more and I used them quite a bit. I see they have all been restored, plus a few more, on the latest version of Photos that comes with High Sierra..... it looks half useful again. I don't know if the version that comes with El Capitan can be updated.

 

[OzBok]

From memory when I did that switch, the explanation was that photos re-indexes everything so until this is done it gets a bit bogged down. Can't remember which version of OS X I encountered it with, but iPhoto was still in the application folder, just not in the dock. It did miss a fair few photos with the migration so being able to open iphoto and drag into photos made it painless enough. Just be wary in case that is still an issue.