Windows 10: Photos app - Indexing Onedrive photos is extremely slow and resource consuming

I have multiple devices phone, tablet, laptops and a desktop and they all sync their photo's to OneDrive. There are approximately 35.000 pictures and videos in that folder. On my laptop, I used the Photos app quite a bit to search for specific photos of people or text. That worked relatively well, I always had a feeling that by far not all photos were correctly tagged but I was impressed by how I could search for text and it would show me all pictures/screenshots/photos containing that text.


I had to re-install my laptop and now I am noticing that it takes a humungous amount of time to process pictures. I've read many topics on this and I already reset/removed/reinstalled the app and add-ons, to no avail. I also read comments like 'oeh that is a large set of pictures, it will just take some time' so I experimented. I left my laptop on for 12 hours with the Photos app on the foreground. I disabled sleep mode and prevented that my monitor would go to sleep. After 12 hours, it processed 61 photos, which boils down to 1 photo per 12 minutes roughly. Note that the Photo's app uses 80% of the CPU during that time.


At this rate, it will take roughly 9.5 months to process all items in my OneDrive folder.


The thing is, I cannot remember even having the Photo's app open that often near not at all before I started using it for the recognition feature and then it worked like a charm.


My question is: why is it so extremely slow, and what can I do to fix it? It has worked before but it is now unusable and I am not not using my laptop for 9 months ;

:)

 

Photo app in Windows 10 is extremely slow

Rebuilding the search index in your computer may help speed-up the loading of photos in the app. The search index is like a directory of files and media in your computer. Follow the steps below:

• Click Start.
• On the search bar, type Indexing Options, and click on Indexing Options from the results.
• Click Advanced.
• Under Troubleshooting, click Rebuild.

We also suggest that you download and install any pending updates that needs to be installed on the computer through Windows Update and check if it helps resolve the issue.

If the issue persists, you may reinstall the Photos app. For steps on how to uninstall and reinstall the Photos app, follow the steps provided by Anil Madishetty on this thread:

Why won't my Photos app load on Windows 10.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

 

Photos app hogging resources in background

I posted what follows as a Reply to another member in the community but cannot find a link it - so I'm replicating it here for future readers.

Photos App Closing Abruptly after opening - ( 30/45 seconds or so).

• 
  Opened the Photos app.
  

• Added a Source folder via the Settings of the Photos App, BEFORE the Photos App tries to close.

• Re-opened the Photos app to Sign Out from OneDrive. Again, you've got to be quick.

• 
  Removed the OneDrive Source folder - no files were deleted.
  

• 
  Also, toggled-off the Microsoft OneDrive option in Settings, which is described as ... "Show my cloud-only content from OneDrive".
  

Once you've Signed out, you can tidy-up and delete any Collections and-the-like, that were trying to Refresh.

Before doing ANY of the above, in File Explorer, I made a New Folder in Pictures and added some photos.

This is the folder above, that was added as a Source folder to the Photos app.

My thinking is, Photos needs a default folder in which to search for photos and if one does not exist, it will default to OneDrive.

As far as maintenance is concerned, I believe the most important point is signing-out.

I was not aware of being signed-in when I was using the Photos app, as I was only using it to quickly preview my photos on my local disk.

I had to click 'Show all Photos' to experience the abrupt shutting down of the Photos app.

========================================================================

Aside:

My previous message of 13th Feb 2018,

"Photos App hogging Resources after Falls Creators Update",

did indeed succeed for myself but I can't help thinking that it could've been a lot easier, if I had Signed Out first.

PS.

The reason it did succeed is that when you access the Indexing Options, the Indexing Service is paused -

allowing you to select/de-select Indices.

 

Photo app in Windows 10 is extremely slow

Hi,

We suggest that you follow the methods below and check if it helps to fix the issue:

Method 1: Run Maintenance task.

The Run maintenance task checks for issues that might slow down your computer. Follow the steps below:

• Click on Start.
• On the search bar, type Troubleshooting and click on
  Troubleshooting from the results.
• Click on Run maintenance task under System and Security.
  

Method 2: Turn off Automatically enhance my photos.

Automatic enhancements are not saved in the file and are only applied upon viewing the photo. Turning it off may help speed up the loading of photos. Here are the steps on how to turn off enhancements:

• Open Photos.
• Click on the three dots on the upper right part of the app and click on
  Settings.
• Under Viewing and editing, turn off Automatically enhance my photos by moving the slider.
• If you are not using OneDrive, you can also turn off Show my cloud-only content from OneDrive.

Let us know how it goes for us to assist you further.